He and Binet were sitting alone together in the parlour of the inn at Pipriac, drinking a very excellent bottle of Volnay.  It was on the night after the fourth and last performance there of “Les Feurberies.”  The business in Pipriac had been as excellent as in Maure and Guichen.  You will have gathered this from the fact that they drank Volnay.

“I will concede it, my dear Scaramouche, so that I may hear the sequel.”

“I am disposed to exercise this power if the inducement is sufficient.  You will realize that for fifteen livres a month a man does not sell such exceptional gifts as mine.

“There is an alternative,” said M. Binet, darkly.

“There is no alternative.  Don’t be a fool, Binet.”

Binet sat up as if he had been prodded.  Members of his company did not take this tone of direct rebuke with him.

“Anyway, I make you a present of it,” Scaramouche pursued, airily.  “Exercise it if you please.  Step outside and inform the police that they can lay hands upon one Andre-Louis Moreau.  But that will be the end of your fine dreams of going to Redon, and for the first time in your life playing in a real theatre.  Without me, you can’t do it, and you know it; and I am not going to Redon or anywhere else, in fact I am not even going to Fougeray, until we have an equitable arrangement.”

“But what heat!” complained Binet, “and all for what?  Why must you assume that I have the soul of a usurer?  When our little arrangement was made, I had no idea how could I? — that you would prove as valuable to me as you are?  You had but to remind me, my dear Scaramouche.  I am a just man.  As from to-day you shall have thirty livres a month.  See, I double it at once.  I am a generous man.”

“But you are not ambitious.  Now listen to me, a moment.”

And he proceeded to unfold a scheme that filled Binet with a paralyzing terror.

“After Redon, Nantes,” he said.  “Nantes and the Theatre Feydau.”

M. Binet choked in the act of drinking.  The Theatre Feydau was a sort of provincial Comedie Francaise.  The great Fleury had played there to an audience as critical as any in France.  The very thought of Redon, cherished as it had come to be by M. Binet, gave him at moments a cramp in the stomach, so dangerously ambitious did it seem to him.  And Redon was a puppet-show by comparison with Nantes.  Yet this raw lad whom he had picked up by chance three weeks ago, and who in that time had blossomed from a country attorney into author and actor, could talk of Nantes and the Theatre Feydau without changing colour.

“But why not Paris and the Comedie Francaise?” wondered M. Binet, with sarcasm, when at last he had got his breath.

“That may come later,” says impudence.

“Eh?  You’ve been drinking, my friend.”