r, and shut it after him with a bang
that resounded through the Palace.

"Don't be angry at him, Bigot, he is not worth it," said Cadet. "'Like
master like man,' as the proverb says. And, after all, I doubt whether
the furred law-cats of the Parliament of Paris would not uphold the
Bourgeois in an appeal to them from the Golden Dog."

Bigot was excessively irritated, for he was lawyer enough to know
that Cadet's fear was well founded. He walked up and down his cabinet,
venting curses upon the heads of the whole party of the Honnetes Gens,
the Governor and Commander of the Forces included. The Marquise de
Pompadour, too, came in for a full share of his maledictions, for
Bigot knew that she had forced the signing of the treaty of Aix la
Chapelle,--influenced less by the exhaustion of France than by a
feminine dislike to camp life, which she had shared with the King, and a
resolution to withdraw him back to the gaieties of the capital, where he
would be wholly under her own eye and influence.

"She prefers love to honor, as all women do!" remarked Bigot; "and likes
money better than either. The Grand Company pays the fiddler for the
royal fetes at Versailles, while the Bourgeois Philibert skims the cream
off the trade of the Colony. This peace will increase his power and make
his influence double what it is already!"

"Egad, Bigot!" replied Cadet, who sat near him smoking a large pipe of
tobacco, "you speak like a preacher in Lent. We have hitherto buttered
our bread on both sides, but the Company will soon, I fear, have no
bread to butter! I doubt we shall have to eat your decrees, which will
be the only things left in the possession of the Friponne."

"My decrees have been hard to digest for some people who think they will
now eat us. Look at that pile of orders, Cadet, in favor of the Golden
Dog!"

The Intendant had long regarded with indignation the ever increasing
trade and influence of the Bourgeois Philibert, who had become the great
banker as well as the great merchant of the Colony, able to meet the
Grand Company itself upon its own ground, and fairly divide with it the
interior as well as the exterior commerce of the Colony.

"Where is this thing going to end?" exclaimed Bigot, sweeping from him
the pile of bills of exchange that lay upon the table. "That Philibert
is gaining ground upon us every day! He is now buying up army bills, and
even the King's officers are flocking to him with their certificates o