“Well,” continued Monsieur Alain, smiling, “when Mongenod found me a good friend he ceased to look as sad and anxious as when he entered; in fact, he became quite gay.  My housekeeper gave us some oysters, white wine, and an omelet, with broiled kidneys, and the remains of a pate my old mother had sent me; also some dessert, coffee, and liqueur of the Iles.  Mongenod, who had been starving for two days, was fed up.  We were so interested in talking about our life before the Revolution that we sat at table till three in the afternoon.  Mongenod told me how he had lost his fortune.  In the first place, his father having invested the greater part of his capital in city loans, when they fell Mongenod lost two thirds of all he had.  Then, having sold his house in the rue de Savoie, he was forced to receive the price in assignats.  After that he took into his head to found a newspaper, ’La Sentinelle;’ that compelled him to fly at the end of six months.  His hopes, he said, were now fixed on the success of a comic opera called ‘Les Peruviens.’  When he said that I began to tremble.  Mongenod turned author, wasting his money on a newspaper, living no doubt in the theatres, connected with singers at the Feydeau, with musicians, and all the queer people who lurk behind the scenes,—­to tell you the truth, he didn’t seem my Mongenod.  I trembled.  But how could I take back the hundred louis?  I saw each roll in each pocket of his breeches like the barrels of two pistols.

“Then,” continued Monsieur Alain, and this time he sighed, “Mongenod went away.  When I was alone, and no longer in presence of hard and cruel poverty, I began, in spite of myself, to reflect.  I was sobered.  ‘Mongenod,’ thought I, ’is perhaps thoroughly depraved; he may have been playing a comedy at my expense.’  His gaiety, the moment I had handed over to him readily such a large sum of money, struck me then as being too like the joy of the valets on the stage when they catch a Geronte.  I ended, where I ought to have begun, by resolving to make some investigations as to my friend Mongenod, who had given me his address,—­written on the back of a playing card!  I did not choose, as a matter of delicacy, to go and see him the next day; he might have thought there was distrust in such promptness, as, indeed, there would have been.  The second day I had certain matters to attend to which took all my time, and it was only at the end of two weeks that, not seeing or hearing of Mongenod, I went one morning from the Croix-Rouge, where I was then living, to the rue des Moineaux, where he lived.  I found he was living in furnished lodgings of the lowest class; but the landlady was a very worthy woman, the widow of a magistrate who had died on the scaffold; she was utterly ruined by the Revolution, and had only a few louis with which to begin the hazardous trade of taking lodgers.”

Here Monsieur Alain interrupted himself to explain.  “I knew her later,” he said; “she then had seven houses in Saint-Roch, and was making quite a little fortune.