“Rennepont in the fullest sense of the word.  Does that astonish you?”

“There is a very ancient family of that name—­the Counts of Rennepont.”

“The deuce there is!” said the other, laughing.

“The Counts of Rennepont are also Dukes of Cardoville,” added Dumoulin.

“Now, come, old fellow! do I look as if I belonged to such a family?—­I, a workman out for a spree?”

“You a workman? why, we are getting into the Arabian Nights!” cried Dumoulin, more and more surprised.  “You give us a Belshazzar’s banquet, with accompaniment of carriages and four, and yet are a workman?  Only tell me your trade, and I will join you, leaving the Vine of the Divine to take care of itself.”

“Come, I say! don’t think that I am a printer of flimsies, and a smasher!” replied Jacques, laughing.

“Oh, comrade! no such suspicion—­”

“It would be excusable, seeing the rigs I run.  But I’ll make you easy on that point.  I am spending an inheritance.”

“Eating and drinking an uncle, no doubt?” said Dumoulin, benevolently.

“Faith, I don’t know.”

“What! you don’t know whom you are eating and drinking?”

“Why, you see, in the first place, my father was a bone-grubber.”

“The devil he was!” said Dumoulin, somewhat out of countenance, though in general not over-scrupulous in the choice of his bottle-companions:  but, after the first surprise, he resumed, with the most charming amenity:  “There are some rag-pickers very high by scent—­I mean descent!”

“To be sure! you may think to laugh at me,” said Jacques, “but you are right in this respect, for my father was a man of very great merit.  He spoke Greek and Latin like a scholar, and often told me that he had not his equal in mathematics; besides, he had travelled a good deal.”

“Well, then,” resumed Dumoulin, whom surprise had partly sobered, “you may belong to the family of the Counts of Rennepont, after all.”

“In which case,” said Rose-Pompon, laughing, “your father was not a gutter-snipe by trade, but only for the honor of the thing.”

“No, no—­worse luck! it was to earn his living,” replied Jacques; “but, in his youth, he had been well off.  By what appeared, or rather by what did not appear, he had applied to some rich relation, and the rich relation had said to him:  ‘Much obliged! try the work’us.’  Then he wished to make use of his Greek, and Latin, and mathematics.  Impossible to do anything—­Paris, it seems, being choke-full of learned men—­so my father had to look for his bread at the end of a hooked stick, and there, too, he must have found it, for I ate of it during two years, when I came to live with him after the death of an aunt, with whom I had been staying in the country.”

“Your respectable father must have been a sort of philosopher,” said Dumoulin; “but, unless he found an inheritance in a dustbin, I don’t see how you came into your property.”