“Vell den, write and name de happy day,” said the Baron, smiling at his humble jest.

“And Monsieur le Baron will allow me to drink his health?” said Contenson, with a manner at once cringing and threatening.

“Shean,” cried the Baron to the gardener, “go and tell Chorge to sent me one twenty francs, and pring dem to me——­”

“Still, Monsieur le Baron, if you have no more information than you have just given me, I doubt whether the great man can be of any use to you.”

“I know off oders!” replied the Baron with a cunning look.

“I have the honor to bid you good-morning, Monsieur le Baron,” said Contenson, taking the twenty-franc piece.  “I shall have the honor of calling again to tell Georges where you are to go this evening, for we never write anything in such cases when they are well managed.”

“It is funny how sharp dese rascals are!” said the Baron to himself; “it is de same mit de police as it is in buss’niss.”

When he left the Baron, Contenson went quietly from the Rue Saint-Lazare to the Rue Saint-Honore, as far as the Cafe David.  He looked in through the windows, and saw an old man who was known there by the name of le Pere Canquoelle.

The Cafe David, at the corner of the Rue de la Monnaie and the Rue Saint-Honore, enjoyed a certain celebrity during the first thirty years of the century, though its fame was limited to the quarter known as that of the Bourdonnais.  Here certain old retired merchants, and large shopkeepers still in trade, were wont to meet—­the Camusots, the Lebas, the Pilleraults, the Popinots, and a few house-owners like little old Molineux.  Now and again old Guillaume might be seen there, coming from the Rue du Colombier.  Politics were discussed in a quiet way, but cautiously, for the opinions of the Cafe David were liberal.  The gossip of the neighborhood was repeated, men so urgently feel the need of laughing at each other!

This cafe, like all cafes for that matter, had its eccentric character in the person of the said Pere Canquoelle, who had been regular in his attendance there since 1811, and who seemed to be so completely in harmony with the good folks who assembled there, that they all talked politics in his presence without reserve.  Sometimes this old fellow, whose guilelessness was the subject of much laughter to the customers, would disappear for a month or two; but his absence never surprised anybody, and was always attributed to his infirmities or his great age, for he looked more than sixty in 1811.

“What has become of old Canquoelle?” one or another would ask of the manageress at the desk.

“I quite expect that one fine day we shall read in the advertisement-sheet that he is dead,” she would reply.