d upholding the Chevalier de
Valois as a respectable and worthy gentleman whom the liberals
calumniated. Luckily for shrewd players, there are people to be found
among the spectators who will always sustain them. Ashamed of having
to defend a piece of wrong-doing, they stoutly deny it. Do not accuse
them of wilful infatuation; such men have a sense of their dignity;
governments set them the example of a virtue which consists in burying
their dead without chanting the Misere of their defeats. If the
chevalier did allow himself this bit of shrewd practice,--which, by
the bye, would have won him the regard of the Chevalier de Gramont, a
smile from the Baron de Foeneste, a shake of the hand from the Marquis
de Moncade,--was he any the less that amiable guest, that witty
talker, that imperturbable card-player, that famous teller of
anecdotes, in whom all Alencon took delight? Besides, in what way was
this action, which is certainly within the rights of a man's own will,
--in what way was it contrary to the ethics of a gentleman? When so
many persons are forced to pay annuities to others, what more natural
than to pay one to his own best friend? But Laius is dead--

To return to the period of which we are writing: after about fifteen
years of this way of life the chevalier had amassed ten thousand and
some odd hundred francs. On the return of the Bourbons, one of his old
friends, the Marquis de Pombreton, formerly lieutenant in the Black
mousquetaires, returned to him--so he said--twelve hundred pistoles
which he had lent to the marquis for the purpose of emigrating. This
event made a sensation; it was used later to refute the sarcasms of
the "Constitutionnel," on the method employed by some emigres in
paying their debts. When this noble act of the Marquis de Pombreton
was lauded before the chevalier, the good man reddened even to his
right cheek. Every one rejoiced frankly at this windfall for Monsieur
de Valois, who went about consulting moneyed people as to the safest
manner of investing this fragment of his past opulence. Confiding in
the future of the Restoration, he finally placed his money on the
Grand-Livre at the moment when the funds were at fifty-six francs and
twenty-five centimes. Messieurs de Lenoncourt, de Navarreins, de
Verneuil, de Fontaine, and La Billardiere, to whom he was known, he
said, obtained for him, from the king's privy purse, a pension of
three hundred francs, and sent him, moreover, the cross of