talk of the bel monde?

“She won’t see you,” he said. “She only prophesies to women, and very few of them. I tried to bring her to book, but her girl, a devilish saucy grisette with a roving eye and a skittish pout, shut the door in my face, by Madame’s orders, if you please.”

“And you went away?”

“No, indeed, I put my knee against the door and said that as I couldn’t pay Madame I must pay her. Not the first time the hussy has been kissed, and it won’t be the last. You, too, will discover the jade hasn’t the dislike to men that her mistress has.”

“What will you wager she will not see me--the mistress?”

“A kiss from my Diane of the ballet. I’ll bet, too, Madame is not at home at all, for she comes and goes like a will-o’-the-wisp. But if you do see her she’ll tell you something cursedly disagreeable. She frightened the poor Des Forges, your Comtesse and mine, into hysterics, and,” his voice dropped, “she warned the Duchesse de Châteauroux she had only three weeks to live--and it was all the poor thing had. Don’t go to her, my dear André; she’ll see you in her crystal globe, face upwards in a heap of dead with an English sword in your guts.”Needless to say, perhaps, that afternoon saw André at the tavern called “The Cock with the Spurs of Gold,” which, save for a brand-new sign-board, had all the appearance of a farmhouse hastily turned into an inn. Buried in the woods between Paris and Versailles it was exactly suited for a rendezvous to which all might repair without the world being any the wiser. André had carefully disguised himself, and as he rapped on the door his appearance suggested rather the comfortable bourgeois than the noble Capitaine-Lieutenant des Chevau-légers de la Garde. To his surprise he won his wager with greater ease than he had dreamed.

The saucy grisette, whose demure demeanour could not conceal the shifty falseness of her roving eyes, took to her mistress the name he gave, the “Sieur de Coutances,” and then, to his joy, speedily ushered him with no little ogling into an empty, low-beamed parlour, which was simply the apartment of a woman who could indulge her love of luxury. Of the sorceress trade there were no traces unless you counted for such an enormous black cat with the most ferocious whiskers, who arched his back on André’s entrance and glared at him with diabolical yellow eyes--a cat to make the flesh creep and bristle as did his whiskers.

“Welcome, Vicomte, welcome!” 

André found 

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