mburse me;
in addition to which I took some pleasure in unbending, and learning from
this simple peasant and loyal man, what the taxpayers were saying of me
and my reforms--a duty I always felt I owed to the king my master.

As a man of breeding it would ill become me to set down the homely truths
I thus learned. The conversations of the vulgar are little suited to a
nobleman's memoirs; but in this I distinguish between the Duke of Sully
and the king's minister, and it is in the latter capacity that I relate
what passed on these diverting occasions. "Ho, Simon," I would say,
encouraging the poor man as he came bowing and trembling before me, "how
goes it, my friend?"

"Badly," he would answer, "very badly until your lordship came this way."

"And how is that, little man?"

"Oh, it is the roads," he always replied, shaking his bald head as he
began to set about his business. "The roads since your lordship became
surveyor-general are so good that not one horse in a hundred casts a shoe;
and then there are so few highwaymen now that not one robber's plates do I
replace in a twelvemonth. There is where it is."

At this I was highly delighted.

"Still, since I began to pass this way times have not been so bad with
you, Simon," I would answer.

Thereto he had one invariable reply.

"No; thanks to Ste. Genevieve and your lordship, whom we call in this
village the poor man's friend, I have a fowl in the pot."

This phrase so pleased me that I repeated it to the king. It tickled his
fancy also, and for some years it was a very common remark of that good
and great ruler, that he hoped to live to see every peasant with a fowl in
his pot.

"But why," I remember I once asked this honest fellow--it was on the last
occasion of the sorrel falling lame there--"do you thank Ste. Genevieve?"

"She is my patron saint," he answered.

"Then you are a Parisian?"

"Your lordship is always right."

"But does her saintship do you any good?" I asked curiously.

"Certainly, by your lordship's leave. My wife prays to her and she loosens
the nails in the sorrel's shoes."

"In fact she pays off an old grudge," I answered, "for there was a time
when Paris liked me little; but hark ye, master smith, I am not sure that
this is not an act of treason to conspire with Madame Genevieve against
the comfort of the king's minister. What think you, you rascal; can you
pass the justice elm without a shiver?"

This threw the simple fellow int