looked droll enough, with your
pale face and your shabby clothes. 'I want to be a soldier,' says you; 'I
want to use the sword.'"

Lagardere nodded. "That was my stubborn law. The world laughed at me, but
I laughed at the world, and I won my wish."

"Just think of it!" said Cocardasse. "Henri de Lagardere, a gentleman
born, without a decent relative, without a decent friend, without a
penny, making his livelihood as a strolling player in the booth of a
mountebank."

While Cocardasse was speaking, Lagardere seemed to listen like a man in a
dream. He forgot for the moment the reeking Inn room where he stood, the
beastly visages that surrounded him, the whimsy that had drifted him
thither. All these things were forgotten, and the man that was little
more than a boy in years was in fancy altogether a boy again, a
shivering, quivering slip of a boy that stood on the gusty high-road and
knuckled his eyelids to keep his eyes from crying. How long ago it
seemed, that time twelve years ago when a mutinous urchin fled from a
truculent uncle to seek his fortune as Heaven might please to guide!
Heaven guided an itinerant mime and mountebank that tramped France with
his doxy to a wet hedge-side where a famished, foot-sore scrap of a lad
lay like a tired dog, trying not to sob. The mountebank was curious, the
mountebank's doxy was kind; both applauded lustily the boy's resolve to
march to Paris, cost what it might cost, and make his fortune there. The
end of the curiosity and the kindness and the applause was that the
little Lagardere found himself at once the apprentice and the adopted son
of the mountebank, with his fortune as far off as the stars. But he
learned many things, the little Lagardere, under the care of that same
mountebank; all that the mountebank could teach him he learned, and he
invented for himself tricks that were beyond the mountebank's skill. How
long ago it seemed! Would ever space of time seem so long again? So the
young man mused swiftly, while Cocardasse told his tale; but ere
Cocardasse had finished, Lagardere was back in the tavern again, and,
when Cocardasse had finished, Lagardere caught him up: "Why not? Some
actors are as honest as bandits. I was no bad mummer, sirs. I could
counterfeit any one of you now so that your mother wouldn't know the
cheat. And my master made me an athlete, too; taught me every trick of
wrestling and tumbling and juggling with the muscles. That is why I was
able to tumble y