e?" he said drawing off to a window.

"Go ahead," said the admiral, fingering the medal of the Legion of
Honor.

Fitzgerald read:

"Have made inquiries. Your man never applied to any of the
metropolitan dailies. Few ever heard of him."

He jammed the message into a pocket, and returned to the group about
the case. Where should he begin? Breitmann had lied.

CHAPTER XI

PREPARATIONS AND COGITATIONS

The story itself was brief enough, but there was plenty of husk to the
grain. The old expatriate was querulous, long-winded, not niggard with
his ink when he cursed the English and damned the Prussians; and he
obtained much gratification in jabbing his quill-bodkin into what he
termed the sniveling nobility of the old regime. Dog of dogs! was he
not himself noble? Had not his parents and his brothers gone to the
guillotine with the rest of them? But he, thank God, had no wooden
mind; he could look progress and change in the face and follow their
bent. And now, all the crimes and heroisms of the Revolution, all the
glorious pageantry of the empire, had come to nothing. A Bourbon,
thick-skulled, sordid, worn-out, again sat upon the throne, while the
Great Man languished on a rock in the Atlantic. Fools that they had
been, not to have hidden the little king of Rome as against this very
dog! It was pitiful. He never saw a shower in June that he did not
hail curses upon it. To have lost Waterloo for a bucketful of water!
Thousand thunders! could he ever forget that terrible race back to
Paris? Could he ever forget the shame of it? Grouchy for a fool and
Bluecher for a blundering ass. _Eh bien_; they would soon tumble the
Bourbons into oblivion again.

A rambling desultory tale. And there were reminiscences of such and
such a great lady's _salon_; the flight from Moscow; the day of the
Bastille; the poor fool of a Louis who donned a red-bonnet and wore the
tricolor; some new opera dances; the flight of his cowardly cousins to
Austria; Austerlitz and Jena; the mad dream in Egypt; the very day when
the Great Man pulled a crown out of his saddle-bag and made himself an
emperor. Just a little corporal from Corsica; think of it! And so on;
all jumbled but keyed with tremendous interest to the listeners and to
Laura herself. It was the golden age of opportunity, of reward, of
sudden generals and princes and dukes. All gone, nothing left but a
few battle-flags; England no longer shaking in her boots,