He exchanged the time of day with the clerks hurrying to the railroad station; he did not disdain to ask the roadmender, seated on a pile of stones, how his labor was getting on, and where he would work next week; he leaned on the gate to listen as if enrapt to the groom and gardener of a neighbor of Clemenceau’s, regretting that the hubbub of cracking guns and other ominous explosions was driving their master from home.  Then, rattling his loose silver, and whistling a fisher’s song, which he must have picked up off the Hyeres, he paused before the gateway of the house which had become the Ogre’s Cave of Montmorency, and read half aloud the placard nailed on a board to a tree and announcing that the property was in the open market.

“The Reine-Claude Villa, eh!” muttered he to himself.  “The name pleases me!  I must go in and see if it is worth the money.  To say nothing,” he added still more secretly, “of the mistress having returned this morning.  I wonder how she had the courage to walk along the road in the dawn, when she might have met the ghost of our poor Gratian von Linden-hohen-Linden!”

This acquaintance with the unpublished story of Madame Clemenceau rather contradicted the aspect and accent of a Marseillais, and, although the black whiskers did not remind one of Von Sendlingen when we saw him at Munich, than of his clear shaven, wrinkled face as the Marchioness de Letourlagneau pianist, it was not so with the burly figure, more robust than corpulent.

He opened the gate without ringing and stepped inside on the gravel path winding up to the pretty but not lively house.

“Attention,” he muttered suddenly, in a military tone.  “Here is our own little spy in the camp—­Hedwig.  It will be as well she does not recognize me without my cue.”

Running his large red hand over his whiskers, he jovially accosted the girl, after adjusting his formidable accoutrement field-glass, guide-book, case and heavy watch chain, adorned with a compass and a pedometer.  She stood on the porch before the windows of the room into which her mistress had entered so early in the morning.

“What do you seek, monsieur?” she challenged, after an unfavorable glance upon the stranger who had greatly offended her idea of dignity by not ringing and waiting at the portals to be officially admitted.

“Pardon me, young lady,” the man said, with the southern accent so strong that a flavor of garlic at once pervaded the air, “but I did not think that your papa and mamma and the family were in the house, seeing that it is for sale.”

“Young lady?  My papa?  Let me tell you that I am the housemaid here and if you have intended to jest—­”

“Jest! purchasing a house, and rather large gardens, is no jest, not in the environs of Paris!” returned the visitor.  “Is it you who are to show the property?”

“No.  If you will wait, I will tell master,” said Hedwig, not at all flattered by being pretendedly taken for “the daughter of the house.”