"'"As sure as my name's Regina, you'll see no more of me, and you'll never hear the 'Carnival of Venice' again, if in forty-eight hours from now you haven't found some way of making a big enough income to support me properly. When I married you, Signor Petito, you deceived me shamefully about the amount of your fortune and the character of your intelligence. A nice thing that fortune of yours, Signor Petito! We're two quarters behind with the rent; and unless we wish to lose our furniture, we must shoot the moon. And as for your intelligence! Well, when a woman is young and pretty like I am, she wants a husband with enough intelligence to find the money to pay her dressmaker's bill. Am I to go back to my mother, or are you going to do it?" "'The earless man is speaking... He says: "'"Oh, shut up, Regina, you're only making my head ache. Can't you leave me in peace to discover the hiding-place of the treasures, which the silly fool downstairs is incapable of getting out of the earth?" "'The silly fool,' said the sleeping Theophrastus, 'is Cartouche!' "'I was waiting for that word,' said M. de la Nox quickly. 'Now I can make him quit _the Present_! Pray, madame! pray, my friend! the hour has come! _I am going to tempt Providence!_' "Then, raising his hand above the brow of my sleeping friend, he said in a voice of command impossible, utterly impossible, to disobey: 'Cartouche, what were you doing at ten o'clock at night on the First of April, 1721?' "'At ten o'clock at night on the First of April, 1721,' said the sleeping Theophrastus without a moment's hesitation, 'I tap sharply twice on the door of the Queen Margot tavern... After the row I should never have believed that I could have got so easily to Ferronnerie Street... But I did for the horse of the French Guard, or rather he fell down near the pump at Notre-Dame... I have thrown my pursuers off my track... At the Queen Margot I find Patapon, Saint James's Gate, and Black-mug... Pretty-Milkmaid is with them... I tell them the story over a bottle of ratafia... I trusted them; and I tell them that I suspect Old Easy-Going, and perhaps Marie-Antoinette herself, of having whispered something to the Police... They all protested... But I shout louder than they; and they are quiet... I tell them that I have made up my mind to deal faithfully with all those who give me any reason to suspect them. I get into a fine rage... Pretty-Milkmaid says that there's no longer any living with me... It's true that there's no longer any living with me... But is it my fault?... Everybody betrays me. I can't sleep two nights running in the same place... Where are the days when I had all Paris on my side? The day of my wedding with Marie-Antoinette? The day when at the Little Seal tavern in Faubourg-Saint-Antoine Street, we sang in chorus: "Guzzle, cullies, and booze away, Till Gabriel's trump on Judgment Day!"