Madame Duvarney responded with a look of interest, and the Seigneur’s eyes steadied to his plate. All at once by that I saw the Seigneur had known of the Governor’s action, and maybe had counseled with him, siding against Bigot. If that were so--as it proved to be--he was in a nest of scorpions; for who among them would spare him: Marin, Cournal, Rigaud, the Intendant himself? Such as he were thwarted right and left in this career of knavery and public evils.
“And our people have turned beggars; poor and starved, they beg at the door of the King’s storehouse--it is well called La Friponne,” said Madame Duvarney, with some heat; for she was ever liberal to the poor, and she had seen manor after manor robbed, and peasant farmers made to sell their corn for a song, to be sold to them again at famine prices by La Friponne. Even now Quebec was full of pilgrim poor begging against the hard winter, and execrating their spoilers.
Doltaire was too fond of digging at the heart of things not to admit she spoke truth.
“La Pompadour et La Friponne! Qu’est que cela, mon petit homme?” “Les deux terribles, ma chere mignonne, Mais, c’est cela-- La Pompadour et La Friponne!”
He said this with cool drollery and point, in the patois of the native, so that he set us all laughing, in spite of our mutual apprehensions.
Then he continued, “And the King has sent a chorus to the play, with eyes for the preposterous make-believe, and more, no purse to fill.”
We all knew he meant himself, and we knew also that so far as money went he spoke true; that though hand-in-glove with Bigot, he was poor, save for what he made at the gaming-table and got from France. There was the thing that might have clinched me to him, had matters been other than they were; for all my life I have loathed the sordid soul, and I would rather, in these my ripe years, eat with a highwayman who takes his life in his hands than with the civilian who robs his king and the king’s poor, and has no better trick than false accounts, nor better friend than the pettifogging knave. Doltaire had no burning love for France, and little faith in anything; for he was of those Versailles water-flies who recked not if the world blackened to cinders when their lights went out. As will be seen by-and-bye, he had come here to seek me, and to serve the Grande Marquise.
