“Ha! my great poet, you’re a pretty good trickster yourself; but you are not deep enough.  What do you mean by taking me for one of your own readers,—­you who sent your friend to Paris, full gallop, to inquire into the property of the Mignon family?  Ha, ha!  I hoax, thou hoaxest, we hoax—­Good!  But do me the honor to believe that I’m deep enough to keep the secrets of my own business.  As the head-clerk of a notary, my heart is a locked box, padlocked!  My mouth never opens to let out anything about a client.  I know all, and I know nothing.  Besides, my passion is well known.  I love Modeste; she is my pupil, and she must make a good marriage.  I’ll fool the duke, if need be; and you shall marry—­”

“Germain, coffee and liqueurs,” said Canalis.

“Liqueurs!” repeated Butscha with a wave of his hand, and the air of a sham virgin repelling seduction; “Ah, those poor deeds! one of ’em was a marriage contract; and that second clerk of mine is as stupid as—­as —­an epithalamium, and he’s capable of digging his penknife right through the bride’s paraphernalia; he thinks he’s a handsome man because he’s five feet six,—­idiot!”

“Here is some creme de the, a liqueur of the West Indies,” said Canalis.  “You, whom Mademoiselle Modeste consults—­”

“Yes, she consults me.”

“Well, do you think she loves me?” asked the poet.

“Loves you? yes, more than she loves the duke,” answered the dwarf, rousing himself from a stupor which was admirably played.  “She loves you for your disinterestedness.  She told me she was ready to make the greatest sacrifices for your sake; to give up dress and spend as little as possible on herself, and devote her life to showing you that in marrying her you hadn’t done so” (hiccough) “bad a thing for yourself.  She’s as right as a trivet,—­yes, and well informed.  She knows everything, that girl.”

“And she has three hundred thousand francs?”

“There may be quite as much as that,” cried the dwarf, enthusiastically.  “Papa Mignon,—­mignon by name, mignon by nature, and that’s why I respect him,—­well, he would rob himself of everything to marry his daughter.  Your Restoration” (hiccough) “has taught him how to live on half-pay; he’d be quite content to live with Dumay on next to nothing, if he could rake and scrape enough together to give the little one three hundred thousand francs.  But don’t let’s forget that Dumay is going to leave all his money to Modeste.  Dumay, you know, is a Breton, and that fact clinches the matter; he won’t go back from his word, and his fortune is equal to the colonel’s.  But I don’t approve of Monsieur Mignon’s taking back that villa, and, as they often ask my advice, I told them so.  ‘You sink too much in it,’ I said; ’if Vilquin does not buy it back there’s two hundred thousand francs which won’t bring you a penny; it only leaves you a hundred thousand to get along with, and it isn’t enough.’  The colonel and Dumay are consulting about it now.  But nevertheless,