t almost crushed the
unfortunate and it enabled her father when he recovered to enrage her
by pointing out that she owed this turn of events to the premature
surrender she had made in defiance of his sound worldly advice. Father
and daughter alike were left to assign the Marquis' desertion, naturally
enough, to the riot at the Feydau. They laid that with the rest to the
account of Scaramouche, and were forced in bitterness to admit that the
scoundrel had taken a superlative revenge. Climene may even have come
to consider that it would have paid her better to have run a straight
course with Scaramouche and by marrying him to have trusted to his
undoubted talents to place her on the summit to which her ambition
urged her, and to which it was now futile for her to aspire. If so, that
reflection must have been her sufficient punishment. For, as Andre-Louis
so truly says, there is no worse hell than that provided by the regrets
for wasted opportunities.

Meanwhile the fiercely sought Andre-Louis Moreau had gone to earth
completely for the present. And the brisk police of Paris, urged on by
the King's Lieutenant from Rennes, hunted for him in vain. Yet he might
have been found in a house in the Rue du Hasard within a stone's throw
of the Palais Royal, whither purest chance had conducted him.

That which in his letter to Le Chapelier he represents as a contingency
of the near future was, in fact, the case in which already he found
himself. He was destitute. His money was exhausted, including that
procured by the sale of such articles of adornment as were not of
absolute necessity.

So desperate was his case that strolling one gusty April morning down
the Rue du Hasard with his nose in the wind looking for what might be
picked up, he stopped to read a notice outside the door of a house on
the left side of the street as you approach the Rue de Richelieu. There
was no reason why he should have gone down the Rue du Hasard. Perhaps
its name attracted him, as appropriate to his case.

The notice written in a big round hand announced that a young man of
good address with some knowledge of swordsmanship was required by M.
Bertrand des Amis on the second floor. Above this notice was a black
oblong board, and on this a shield, which in vulgar terms may be
described as red charged with two swords crossed and four fleurs de lys,
one in each angle of the saltire. Under the shield, in letters of gold,
ran the legend: