I was at the moment grilling some bacon before the fire in the board-room, my plate laid on the corner of a marqueterie table, with a newspaper underneath to preserve it. I invited Monpavon’s valet to share my frugal meal; but since he has waited on a marquis he had come to think that he formed part of the nobility, and he declined with a dignified air, perfectly ridiculous with his hollow cheeks. He began by telling me that he still had no news of his master; that they had sent him away from the club, all the papers under seal, and a horde of creditors like locusts on the marquis’s small wardrobe. “So that I am a little short,” added M. Francis. That is to say, that he had not the worth of a radish in his pockets, that he had been sleeping for two days on the benches in the streets, awakened at each instant by the police, obliged to rise, to pretend to be drunk so as to seek another shelter. As to eating, I believe he had not done so for a long time, for he looked at the food with such hungry eyes as to wring one’s heart, and when I insisted on putting before him a slice of bacon and a glass of wine, he fell on it like a wolf. All at once the blood came back to his cheeks and, still eating, he began to chatter. “You know, _pere_ Passajon,” said he to me between two mouthfuls, “I know where he is. I have seen him.” He winked his eye knowingly. I looked at him in wonder. “Who is it you have seen, M. Francis?” “The marquis, my master--over there in the little white house behind Notre-Dame.” (He did not use the word morgue, it is too low.) “I was sure I should find him there. I went there first thing next morning. There he was. Oh, well disguised, I tell you. Only his valet could recognise him. The hair gray, the teeth gone, the wrinkles showing his sixty-five years, which he used to hide so well. On the marble slab, with the tap running above, I seemed to see him at his dressing-table.” “And you said nothing?” “No. I knew his intentions on the subject for long. I let him go away discreetly, without awakening attention, as he wished. But, all the same, he might have given me a crust of bread before he went, after a service of twenty years.” And on a sudden, striking the table with his fist with rage: “When I think that if I had liked I might have been with Mora, instead of going to Monpavon, that I might have had Louis’s place. What luck he has had! How many bags of gold he laid his hands on when his duke died! And the wardrobe--hundreds of shirts, a dressing-gown of blue fox fur worth more than twenty thousand francs. Like Noel, too, he must have made his pile! He had to hurry, too, for he knew that it would stop soon. Now there is nothing to be got in the Place Vendome. An old policeman of a mother who manages everything. Saint-Romans is to be sold, the pictures are to be sold, half the house to be let. It is a real break-up.”