“The devil! so peers of France still travel in your coach, do they?” said Georges, remembering his adventure with the Comte de Serizy.  “Well, I’ll take that place in the interieur.”

He cast a glance of examination on Oscar and his mother, but did not recognize them.

Oscar’s skin was now bronzed by the sun of Africa; his moustache was very thick and his whiskers ample; the hollows in his cheeks and his strongly marked features were in keeping with his military bearing.  The rosette of an officer of the Legion of honor, his missing arm, the strict propriety of his dress, would all have diverted Georges recollections of his former victim if he had had any.  As for Madame Clapart, whom Georges had scarcely seen, ten years devoted to the exercise of the most severe piety had transformed her.  No one would ever have imagined that that gray sister concealed the Aspasia of 1797.

An enormous old man, very simply dressed, though his clothes were good and substantial, in whom Oscar recognized Pere Leger, here came slowly and heavily along.  He nodded familiarly to Pierrotin, who appeared by his manner to pay him the respect due in all lands to millionaires.

“Ha! ha! why, here’s Pere Leger! more and more preponderant!” cried Georges.

“To whom have I the honor of speaking?” asked old Leger, curtly.

“What! you don’t recognize Colonel Georges, the friend of Ali pacha?  We travelled together once upon a time, in company with the Comte de Serizy.”

One of the habitual follies of those who have fallen in the world is to recognize and desire the recognition of others.

“You are much changed,” said the ex-farmer, now twice a millionaire.

“All things change,” said Georges.  “Look at the Lion d’Argent and Pierrotin’s coach; they are not a bit like what they were fourteen years ago.”

“Pierrotin now controls the whole service of the Valley of the Oise,” replied Monsieur Leger, “and sends out five coaches.  He is the bourgeois of Beaumont, where he keeps a hotel, at which all the diligences stop, and he has a wife and daughter who are not a bad help to him.”

An old man of seventy here came out of the hotel and joined the group of travellers who were waiting to get into the coach.

“Come along, Papa Reybert,” said Leger, “we are only waiting now for your great man.”

“Here he comes,” said the steward of Presles, pointing to Joseph Bridau.

Neither Georges nor Oscar recognized the illustrious artist, for his face had the worn and haggard lines that were now famous, and his bearing was that which is given by success.  The ribbon of the Legion of honor adorned his black coat, and the rest of his dress, which was extremely elegant, seemed to denote an expedition to some rural fete.

At this moment a clerk, with a paper in his hand, came out of the office (which was now in the former kitchen of the Lion d’Argent), and stood before the empty coupe.