Sit down, my good Andoche. I have need to be
a little gay. Suppose we talk of Paris."

It was the cue for Andoche to slip gratefully into a chair, possess the
carafe and prepare to listen.

II

At the proper age of thirty-one, the Comte de Bonzag fell heir to the
enormous sum of fifteen thousand francs from an uncle who had made the
fortune in trade. With no more delay than it took the great Emperor to
fling an army across the Alps, he descended on Paris, resolved to
repulse all advances which Louis Napoleon might make, and to lend the
splendor of his name and the weight of his fortune only to the Cercle
Royale. Two weeks devoted to this loyal end strengthened the Bourbon
lines perceptibly, but resulted in a shrinkage of four thousand francs
in his own. Next remembering that the aristocracy had always been the
patron of the arts, he determined to make a rapid examination of the
_coulisses_ of the opera and the regions of the ballet. A six-days'
reconnaissance discovered not the slightest signs of disaffection; but
the thoroughness of his inquiries was such that the completion of his
mission found him with just one thousand francs in pocket. Being not
only a Loyalist and a patron of the arts, but a statesman and a
philosopher, he turned his efforts toward the Quartier Latin, to the
great minds who would one day take up the guidance of a more enlightened
France. There he made the discovery that one amused himself more than at
the Cercle Royale, and spent considerably less than in the arts, and
that at one hundred francs a week he aroused an enthusiasm for the
Bourbons which almost attained the proportions of a riot.

The three months over, he retired to his estate at Keragouil, having
profoundly stirred all classes of society, given new life to the cause
of His Majesty, and regretting only, as a true gentleman, the frightful
devastation he had left in the hearts of the ladies.

Unfortunately, these brilliant services to Parisian society and his king
had left him without any society of his own, forced to the consideration
of the difficult problem of how to keep his pipe lighted, his cellar
full, and his maid-of-all-work in a state of hopeful expectation, on
nothing a year.

Nothing daunted, he attacked this problem of the family bankruptcy with
the vigor and the daring of a D'Artagnan. Each year he collected
laboriously twenty francs, and invested them in two tickets for the
Great Lottery, valiantly resolved