pronounced itself. To this influence I added that of such wit as Heaven
has graced me with, and by a word here and another there I set myself to
lash their mood back into the joviality out of which his coming had for
the moment driven it.

And so, presently, Good-Humour spread her mantle over us anew, and
quip and jest and laughter decked our speech, until the noise of our
merry-making drifting out through the open windows must have been borne
upon the breeze of that August night down the rue Saint-Dominique,
across the rue de l'Enfer, to the very ears perhaps of those within the
Luxembourg, telling them that Bardelys and his friends kept another of
those revels which were become a byword in Paris, and had contributed
not a little to the sobriquet of "Magnificent" which men gave me.

But, later, as the toasts grew wild and were pledged less for the sake
of the toasted than for that of the wine itself, wits grew more barbed
and less restrained by caution; recklessness hung a moment, like a bird
of prey, above us, then swooped abruptly down in the words of that fool
La Fosse.

"Messieurs," he lisped, with that fatuousness he affected, and with his
eye fixed coldly upon Chatellerault, "I have a toast for you." He rose
carefully to his feet--he had arrived at that condition in which to move
with care is of the first importance. He shifted his eye from the Count
to his glass, which stood half empty. He signed to a lacquey to fill
it. "To the brim, gentlemen," he commanded. Then, in the silence that
ensued, he attempted to stand with one foot on the ground and one on
his chair; but encountering difficulties of balance, he remained
upright--safer if less picturesque.

"Messieurs, I give you the most peerless, the most beautiful, the most
difficult and cold lady in all France. I drink to those her thousand
graces, of which Fame has told us, and to that greatest and most vexing
charm of all--her cold indifference to man. I pledge you, too, the swain
whose good fortune it maybe to play Endymion to this Diana.

"It will need," pursued La Fosse, who dealt much in mythology and
classic lore--"it will need an Adonis in beauty, a Mars in valour, an
Apollo in song, and a very Eros in love to accomplish it. And I fear
me," he hiccoughed, "that it will go unaccomplished, since the one man
in all France on whom we have based our hopes has failed. Gentlemen, to
your feet! I give you the matchless Roxalanne de Lavedan!"

Such amuseme