h his cheery
smile.

"Are you sorry?" said Godefroid.

"Oh, no! and you can judge by the minuteness with which I am telling you
all this how great a place this event has held in my life.

"Mongenod, endowed with an excellent heart and fine courage, a trifle
Voltairean, was inclined to play the nobleman," went on Monsieur Alain.
"His education at Grassins, where there were many young nobles, and
his various gallantries, had given him the polished manners and ways of
people of condition, who were then called aristocrats. You can therefore
imagine how great was my surprise to see such symptoms of poverty in the
young and elegant Mongenod of 1787 when my eyes left his face and rested
on his garments. But as, at that unhappy period of our history, some
persons assumed a shabby exterior for safety, and as he might have had
some other and sufficient reasons for disguising himself, I awaited an
explanation, although I opened the way to it. 'What a plight you are in,
my dear Mongenod!' I said, accepting the pinch of snuff he offered me
from a copper and zinc snuff-box. 'Sad indeed!' he answered; 'I have
but one friend left, and that is you. I have done all I could to avoid
appealing to you; but I must ask you for a hundred louis. The sum is
large, I know,' he went on, seeing my surprise; 'but if you gave me
fifty I should be unable ever to return them; whereas with one hundred
I can seek my fortune in better ways,--despair will inspire me to find
them.' 'Then you have nothing?' I exclaimed. 'I have,' he said, brushing
away a tear, 'five sous left of my last piece of money. To come here
to you I have had my boots blacked and my face shaved. I possess what
I have on my back. But,' he added, with a gesture, 'I owe my landlady
a thousand francs in assignats, and the man I buy cold victuals from
refused me credit yesterday. I am absolutely without resources.' 'What
do you think of doing?' 'Enlisting as a soldier if you cannot help me.'
'You! a soldier, Mongenod?' 'I will get myself killed, or I will be
General Mongenod.' 'Well,' I said, much moved, 'eat your breakfast in
peace; I have a hundred louis.'

"At that point," said the goodman, interrupting himself and looking at
Godefroid with a shrewd air, "I thought it best to tell him a bit of a
fib."

"'That is all I possess in the world,' I said. 'I have been waiting
for a fall in the Funds to invest that money; but I will put it in your
hands instead, and you shall consider me