Some broken pottery lay on the ground, and a few vessels, colored and lustrous so they shone in the firelight, stood on a stump near him.

The hollow was not a deep one, but if the men had been talking, their voices did not reach us until the curtain parted.

“You are a great fool or a great rascal, or both, Bellenger,” the superior man said.

“Most people are, your highness,” responded the one at the wheel.  He kept it going, as if his earthenware was of more importance than the talk.

“You are living a miserable life, roving about.”

“Many other Frenchmen are no better off than I am, my prince.”

“True enough.  I’ve roved about myself.”

“Did you turn schoolmaster in Switzerland, prince?”

“I did.  My family are in Switzerland now.”

“Some of the nobles were pillaged by their peasants as well as by the government.  But your house should not have lost everything.”

“You are mistaken about our losses.  The Orleans Bourbons have little or no revenue left.  Monsieur and Artois were the Bourbons able to maintain a court about them in exile.  So you have to turn potter, to help support the idiot and yourself?”

“Is your highness interested in art?”

“What have I to do with art?”

“But your highness can understand how an idea will haunt a man.  It is true I live a wretched life, but I amuse myself trying to produce a perfect vase.  I have broken thousands.  If a shape answers my expectations, that very shape is certain to crack in the burning or run in the glaze.”

“Then you don’t make things to sell?”

“Oh, yes.  I make noggins and crockery to sell in the towns.  There is a kind of clay in these hills that suits me.”

“The wonderful vase,” said the other yawning, “might perhaps interest me more if some facts were not pressing for discussion.  I am a man of benevolent disposition, Bellenger.”

“Your royal highness—­”

“Stop!  I have been a revolutionist, like my poor father, whose memory you were about to touch—­and I forbid it.  But I am a man whose will it is to do good.  It is impossible I should search you out in America to harm my royal cousin.  Now I want to know the truth about him.”

Madame de Ferrier had forgotten her breath.  We both stood fastened on that scene in another world, guiltless of eavesdropping.

The potter shifted his eyes from side to side, seeming to follow the burr of his vessel upon the wheel.

“I find you with a creature I cannot recognize as my royal cousin.  If this is he, sunk far lower than when he left France in your charge, why are two-thirds of his pension sent out from New York to another person, while you receive for his maintenance only one-third?”

The potter bounded from his wheel, letting the vessel spin off to destruction, and danced, stretching his long mustaches abroad in both hands as the ancients must have rent their clothes.  He cried that he had been cheated, stripped, starved.