that can do
twenty miles an hour, and started for Troyes with a letter in order that
it may reach Paris to-morrow! And only nine years and a half old! What
will he be at twenty?"

The sub-prefect listened mechanically to these remarks. Julien gossiped
on, his master listening, absorbed in thought about the stranger.

"Wait here," he said to the man as he turned with slow steps to re-enter
the salon. "What a mess!" he thought to himself,--"a man who dines at
Gondreville and spends the night at Cinq-Cygnes! Mysteries indeed!"

"Well?" cried the circle around Mademoiselle Beauvisage as soon as he
reappeared.

"He is a count, and _vieille roche_, I answer for it."

"Oh! how I should like to see him!" cried Cecile.

"Mademoiselle," said Antonin, smiling and looking maliciously at Madame
Mollot, "he is tall and well-made and does not wear a wig. His little
groom was as drunk as the twenty-four cantons; they filled him with
champagne at Gondreville and that little scamp, only nine years old,
answered my man Julien, who asked him about his master's wig, with all
the assumption of an old valet: 'My master! wear a wig!--if he did I'd
leave him. He dyes his hair and that's bad enough.'"

"Your opera-glass magnifies," said Achille Pigoult to Madame Mollot, who
laughed.

"Well, the tiger of the handsome count, drunk as he is, is now riding
to Troyes to post a letter, and he'll get there, as they say, in
five-quarters of an hour."

"I'd like to have that tiger," said Vinet.

"If the count dined at Gondreville we shall soon know all about him,"
remarked Cecile; "for my grandpapa is going there to-morrow morning."

"What will strike you as very strange," said Antonin Goulard, "is that
the party at Cinq-Cygne have just sent Mademoiselle Anicette, the maid
of the Princesse de Cadignan, in the Cinq-Cygne carriage, with a note to
the stranger, and he is going now to pass the night there."

"_Ah ca_!" said Olivier Vinet, "then he is not a man; he's a devil, a
phoenix, he will poculate--"

"Ah, fie! monsieur," said Madame Mollot, "you use words that are
really--"

"'Poculate' is a word of the highest latinity, madame," replied Vinet,
gravely. "So, as I said, he will poculate with Louis Philippe in the
morning, and banquet at the Holy-Rood with Charles the Tenth at
night. There is but one reason that allows a decent man to go to both
camps--from Montague to Capulet! Ha, ha! I know who that stranger is.
He's--"

"The presi