“Pray, is sleep a financial scheme?” I whispered.

“Indeed, yes!” said Calonne, who had guessed our words from the mere motion of our lips.  “Would to God we could sleep long, and then the awakening you are about to see would never happen.”

“Monseigneur,” said the dramatist, “I must thank you—­”

“For what?”

“Monsieur de Mirabeau has started for Berlin.  I don’t know whether we might not both have drowned ourselves in that affair of ‘les Eaux.’”

“You have too much memory, and too little gratitude,” replied the minister, annoyed at having one of his secrets divulged in my presence.

“Possibly,” said Beaumarchais, cut to the quick; “but I have millions that can balance many a score.”

Calonne pretended not to hear.

It was long past midnight when the play ceased.  Supper was announced.  There were ten of us at table:  Bodard and his wife, Calonne, Beaumarchais, the two strange men, two pretty women, whose names I will not give here, a fermier-general, Lavoisier, and myself.  Out of thirty guests who were in the salon when I entered it, only these ten remained.  The two queer species did not consent to stay until they were urged to do so by Madame Bodard, who probably thought she was paying her obligations to the surgeon by giving him something to eat, and pleasing her husband (with whom she appeared, I don’t precisely know why, to be coquetting) by inviting the lawyer.

The supper began by being frightfully dull.  The two strangers and the fermier-general oppressed us.  I made a sign to Beaumarchais to intoxicate the son of Esculapius, who sat on his right, giving him to understand that I would do the same by the lawyer, who was next to me.  As there seemed no other way to amuse ourselves, and it offered a chance to draw out the two men, who were already sufficiently singular, Monsieur de Calonne smiled at our project.  The ladies present also shared in the bacchanal conspiracy, and the wine of Sillery crowned our glasses again and again with its silvery foam.  The surgeon was easily managed; but at the second glass which I offered to my neighbor the lawyer, he told me with the frigid politeness of a usurer that he should drink no more.

At this instant Madame de Saint-James chanced to introduce, I scarcely know how, the topic of the marvellous suppers to the Comte de Cagliostro, given by the Cardinal de Rohan.  My mind was not very attentive to what the mistress of the house was saying, because I was watching with extreme curiosity the pinched and livid face of my little neighbor, whose principal feature was a turned-up and at the same time pointed nose, which made him, at times, look very like a weasel.  Suddenly his cheeks flushed as he caught the words of a dispute between Madame de Saint-James and Monsieur de Calonne.

“But I assure you, monsieur,” she was saying, with an imperious air, “that I saw Cleopatra, the queen.”