“Pardieu!” replied the chevalier, “I am indeed unlucky when the only tooth left to him remains to bite me.”

This pun had been repeated, and had reached Louis xiv, so that the chevalier presently heard, directly enough this time, that the king desired him to travel for some years.  He knew the danger of neglecting—­such intimations, and since he thought the country after all preferable to the Bastille, he left Paris, and arrived at Avignon, surrounded by the halo of interest that naturally attends a handsome young persecuted nobleman.

The virtue of Madame d’Urban was as much cried up at Avignon as the ill-behaviour of the chevalier had been reprobated in Paris.  A reputation equal to his own, but so opposite in kind, could not fail to be very offensive to him, therefore he determined immediately upon arriving to play one against the other.

Nothing was easier than the attempt.  M. d’Urban, sure of his wife’s virtue, allowed her entire liberty; the chevalier saw her wherever he chose to see her, and every time he saw her found means to express a growing passion.  Whether because the hour had come for Madame d’Urban, or whether because she was dazzled by the splendour of the chevalier’s belonging to a princely house, her virtue, hitherto so fierce, melted like snow in the May sunshine; and the chevalier, luckier than the poor page, took the husband’s place without any attempt on Madame d’Urban’s part to cry for help.

As all the chevalier desired was public triumph, he took care to make the whole town acquainted at once with his success; then, as some infidels of the neighbourhood still doubted, the chevalier ordered one of his servants to wait for him at the marquise’s door with a lantern and a bell.  At one in the morning, the chevalier came out, and the servant walked before him, ringing the bell.  At this unaccustomed sound, a great number of townspeople, who had been quietly asleep, awoke, and, curious to see what was happening, opened their windows.  They beheld the chevalier, walking gravely behind his servant, who continued to light his master’s way and to ring along the course of the street that lay between Madame d’Urban’s house and his own.  As he had made no mystery to anyone of his love affair, nobody took the trouble even to ask him whence he came.  However, as there might possibly be persons still unconvinced, he repeated this same jest, for his own satisfaction, three nights running; so that by the morning of the fourth day nobody had any doubts left.

As generally happens in such cases, M. d’Urban did not know a word of what was going on until the moment when his friends warned him that he was the talk of the town.  Then he forbade his wife to see her lover again.  The prohibition produced the usual results:  on the morrow, as, soon as M. d’Urban had gone out, the marquise sent for the chevalier to inform him of the catastrophe in which they were both involved; but she found him far