“His Majesty Louis XVI composed and wrote that prayer himself,” said Louis Philippe.  “The comfort-loving priests had a fashion of dividing the missal into three or four parts, that a volume might not be so heavy to carry about in their pockets.  This is the second volume.  It was picked up in the Tuileries after that palace was sacked.”

I told him mine must be the preceding volume, because I did not know there was any continuation.  The prayers of the church had not been my study.

“Where did you get yours, Lazarre?”

“Madame de Ferrier gave it to me.  When I saw it I remembered, as if my head were split open to show the picture, that my mother had read from that very book to me.  I cannot explain it, but so it was.”

“I am not surprised she believes, against Bellenger’s evidence, that you are Louis of France.”

“I will bring my book and show it to you.”

We compared the volumes after supper, and one was the mate of the other.

The inn dining-room had one long table stretched down its entire length, heaped with wild meats and honey and pastries and fish in abundance.  General Jackson sat at one end, and at the other sat the landlord, explaining to all his guests what each dish was, and urging good appetite.  I sat by Louis Philippe, whose quality was known only to myself, with Doctor Chantry on the other side fretting for the attendance to which Jean had used him.

My master was so tired that I put him early to bed; and then sat talking nearly all night with the gracious gentleman to whom I felt bound by gratitude and by blood.

III

Dieppe, high and glaring white above the water, will always symbolize to me the gate of France.  The nobility of that view remained in my thoughts when half the distance to Paris was traversed.

I could shut my eyes and see it as I lay on the straw in a post-house stable.  A square hole in the front of the grenier gave upon the landscape.  Even respectable houses in that part of the country were then built with few or no windows; but delicious masses of grayness they were, roofed with thick and overhanging thatch.

“The stables of France are nothing but covered dunghills,” Doctor Chantry grumbled; so when I crept with the Indian to lodgings over the cattle, one of the beds in the house was hired for the gouty master.  Even at inns there were two or three beds in a room where they set us to dine.

“An English inn-keeper would throw their furniture into the fire!” he cried in a language fortunately not understood.

“But we have two good rooms on the ground floor, and another for Skenedonk,” I sometimes remonstrated with him, “at three shillings and sixpence a day, in your money.”

“You would not see any man, let his rank be what it may,” Doctor Chantry retorted, “dining in his bedroom, in England.  And look at these walls!—­papered with two or three kinds of paper, the bare spots hung with tapestry moth-eaten and filled with spiders!  And what have we for table?—­a board laid on cross-bars!  And the oaken chairs are rush-bottomed, and so straight the backs are a persecution!  The door hinges creak in these inns, the wind blows through—­”