to your academy, old rogues."
Cocardasse was reminiscent. "Faith, you 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 you about so pleasantly just now. I should have been a mountebank to this day but for an accident."
Passepoil was curious. "What accident?" he asked.
Lagardere answered him: "A brawl over a wench with a bully. I challenged him, though I was more at home with a toasting-fork than a sword. I caught up an unfamiliar weapon, but he nicked the steel from my hand at a pass and banged me with the flat of his blade. The girl laughed. The bully grinned. I swore to learn swordcraft."
"And you did," said Passepoil. "In six months you were our best pupil."
Cocardasse continued: "In twelve you were our master."
Passepoil questioned again: "What became of your bully?"
Lagardere was laconic: "We had a chat afterwards. I attended his funeral."
Cocardasse clapped his hands. "Well begun, little Parisian."
Passepoil pointed admiringly at Lagardere. "Look at you now, a captain in the king’s guard."
Lagardere laughed cheerfully. "Look if you like, but I am no such thing. I am cashiered, exiled from Paris."
"Why?" asked Cocardasse, and Lagardere replied with a question: "Do you remember the Baron de Brissac?"
Cocardasse nodded. "One of the best swords in Paris."
Lagardere resumed: "Well, the late baron – "
Passepoil interrupted: "The late baron?"
Lagardere explained: "Brissac had a lewd tongue and smirched a woman. So I pulled his ears."
Cocardasse grinned. "The devil you did!"
"Yes," said Lagardere, "they were very long and tempting. We resumed the argument elsewhere. It was brief. Good-bye, Brissac! But as the good king, thanks to the good cardinal, now frowns upon duelling, I am exiled when I ought to be rewarded."
Cocardasse sighed. "There is no encouragement for virtue nowadays."
Lagardere’s voice was as cheerful as if there were no such thing in the world as exile. "Well, there I was at my wit’s end, and my nimble wits found work for me. ’If I must leave France,’ I said, ’I will go to Spain, where the spirit of chivalry still reigns.’ So I raised a regiment of adventurers like myself – broken gentlemen, ruined spendthrifts, poor devils out at elbow, gallant soldiers of fortune one and all. They wait for me a mile from here. We shall find work to do in Spain or elsewhere. The world is wide, and it has always work for good swords to do."
Cocardasse looked at him admiringly. "Your sword will never rust for want of use," he said, with approval.
Lagardere answered him, briskly: "Why should it? ’Tis the best friend in the world. What woman’s eye ever shone as brightly as its blade, what woman’s tongue ever discoursed such sweet music?"
Cocardasse took off his hat and swung it. "Hurrah for the sword!" he shouted.
Lagardere’s glance applauded his enthusiasm. "Iron was God’s best gift to man, and he God’s good servant who hammered it into shape and gave it point and edge. I shall never be happy until I am master of it."
Æsop joined the conversation mockingly. "I thought you were master of it," he said, with an obvious sneer.
Cocardasse and Passepoil looked horrified at the hunchback’s impertinence, but Lagardere did not seem to be vexed, and answered, quite amiably: "So did I till lately." Then he said, addressing himself generally to the company: "Have any of you ever heard of the thrust of Nevers?"
A tremor of excitement ran through his audience. Cocardasse took up the talk: "We spoke of it but now."
"Well," said Lagardere, "what do you think of it?"
Æsop, the irrepressible, thrust in his opinion. "Never was secret thrust invented that cannot be parried."
Lagardere looked at him somewhat contemptuously. "So I thought till I crossed swords with Nevers. Now I think differently."
Cocardasse whistled. "The devil you do," he commented.
"I will tell you all about it," said Lagardere. "It happened three months ago. That secret thrust piqued me. Then people talked too much about Nevers; that irritated me. Wherever I went, from court to camp, from tavern to palace, the name of Nevers was dinned in my ears. The barber dressed your hair à la Nevers. The tailor cut your coat à la Nevers. Fops carried canes à la Nevers; ladies scented themselves à la Nevers. One day at the inn they served me cutlets à la Nevers. I flung the damned dish out of the window. On the doorstep I met my boot-maker, who offered to sell me a pair of boots à la Nevers. I cuffed the rascal and flung him ten louis as a salve. But the knave only said to me: ’Monsieur de Nevers beat me once, but he gave me a hundred pistoles.’"
Passepoil sighed for the sorrows of his young pupil: "Poor little Parisian!"
Lagardere went on with his tale: "Now I am vainglorious enough to hold that cutlets would taste good if they were cooked à la Lagardere; that coats à la Lagardere would make good wearing, and boots à la Lagardere good walking. I came to the conclusion that Paris was not big enough for the pair of us, and that Nevers was the man to quit the field. Like Æsop yonder, I laughed at the secret thrust."
He
