I was the man with the forty crowns; but since fortunes had not yet been levelled, nor the price of commodities reduced, there was nothing to serve as a counterpoise to my rapidly diminishing purse. I could not reckon on further help from my family, exposed in Brittany to the double scourge of the Chouans[183] and the Terror. I saw nothing before me but the workhouse or the Thames. [Sidenote: A contrast.] Some of the Emigrants' servants, whom their masters could no longer feed, had turned into eating-house keepers in order to feed their masters. God knows the merry meals that were made at these ordinaries! God knows, too, what politics were talked there! All the victories of the Republic were turned into defeats, and, if by chance one entertained a doubt as to an immediate restoration, he was declared a Jacobin. Two old bishops, who looked like live corpses, were walking one morning in St James's Park: "Monseigneur," said one, "do you think we shall be in France by June?" "Why, monseigneur," replied the other, after ripe reflection, "I see nothing against it." Peltier, the man of resource, unearthed me, or rather unnested me, in my eyry. He had read in a Yarmouth newspaper that a society of antiquarians was going to produce a history of the County of Suffolk, and that they wanted a Frenchman able to decipher some French twelfth-century manuscripts from the Camden[184] Collection. The parson at Beccles was at the head of the undertaking; he was the man to whom to apply. "That will just suit you," said Peltier; "go down there, decipher that old waste-paper, go on sending copy for the _Essai_ to Baylis; I'll make the wretch go on with his printing; and you will come back to London with two hundred guineas in your pocket, your work done, and go ahead!" I tried to stammer out some objections: "What the deuce!" cried my man. "Do you want to stay in this _palace_, where I'm catching cold already? If Rivarol, Champcenetz, Mirabeau-Tonneau and I had gone about pursing up our mouths, a fine business we should have made of the _Actes des Apôtres!_ Do you know that that story of Hingant is making the devil of a to-do? So you both wanted to let yourself die of hunger, did you? Ha, ha, ha! Pouf!.... Ha, ha!" Peltier, doubled in two, was holding his knees with laughter. He had just received a hundred subscriptions to his paper from the colonies; he had been paid for them, and jingled his guineas in his pocket. He dragged me by main force, together with the apoplectic La Boüétardais and two tattered Emigrants who were at hand, to dine at the London Tavern. He made us drink port and eat roast beef and plum-pudding till we were ready to burst. "Monsieur le comte," he asked my cousin, "what makes you carry your potato-trap askew like that?"