Roger had just spent a fortnight in Paris. He had looked up a number of old acquaintances and made many new ones; he had talked with innumerable people in cafes, shops and places of entertainment. Having lived for so long in France he already knew that the average Englishman's belief, that the French were a nation of bloodthirsty cut-throats dominated by a leaven of fastidious but decadent and unscrupulous aristocrats, was far from the mark; and that in reality the individuals of the two races were inspired in their private lives by very similar thoughts and feelings. But on his return to the French capital he was very soon conscious of two things.
Firstly, although he had thought himself so well informed at the age of nineteen, how abysmally ignorant he had really been upon a great variety of matters. Secondly, that a quite staggering change had taken place in the mentality of the French people.
Previously, with the exception of one in a thousand, they had given their whole minds to business and pleasure, regarding politics as a thing apart that concerned only the King and his Ministers: so that however much they might deplore the state into which their country had fallen it was futile for them to think about it, since it was quite impossible for them to influence the future course of events. But now, with the extraordinary innovation of being given the opportunity to elect representatives who would voice their opinions, politics had entered like a virus into the blood of the whole race. They were like a child with a new toy, and wherever he went people were discussing in a most heated fashion the forthcoming meeting of the States General, the excellencies of Monsieur Necker or the iniquities of the "Austrian woman", as they now called the Queen. It was therefore easy for him to gather a consensus of opinion and his unobtrusive activities had soon led him to three definite conclusions:—
That the people of Paris were not in the main antagonistic towards the King or the monarchy, as such; but they were towards the Queen and a continuance of absolutism. That there would be serious trouble if the King dismissed the States with nothing accomplished. And that His Highness the Due d'Orleans was sailing very near treason in some of his measures to gain popularity for himself at the expense of the Court and his cousin the King.
From the provincials he met he gathered that the elections had set the whole country in a ferment, and that opinion in the big cities, particularly Marseilles and Lyons, was running nearly as strongly in favour of forcing some definite concession from die King as it was in Paris; but a tour of the provincial cities to verify these possibly biased statements would have been a lengthy undertaking, and he had felt that in any case feeling in them could have little influence on events during the opening sessions of the States. On the other hand the much abused Court might yet have some strong cards up its sleeve to play in an emergency, so he had decided that his next step must be an attempt to ascertain its real strength and disposition.
He needed no telling that it was one thing to lounge about Paris listening to any idler who cared to air his views and quite another to become acquainted with those of the King and his advisers; so on his arrival at Fontainebleau, five nights before, he had been very conscious that only then had his real mission begun, and from the first he had been extremely perplexed how to set about it.
Short of some unforeseen stroke of fortune, or the exercise of an ingenuity which seemed to have entirely deserted him in these past few days, the only means of securing the entree to the royal circle was the normal one of being formally presented at the French Court; and during his previous stay in France his only visits to Versailles had been in the guise of a confidential secretary bringing papers to his master, the Marquis de Rochambeau, when that nobleman occupied his apartment in the Palace overnight.
Any travelling Englishman of good family could easily arrange for the British Ambassador to present him, but it was obviously impossible for Roger to do so and at the same time preserve his incognito. To abandon it would, he felt, be to throw away his best card for finding out the true situation at the very opening of the game; although to maintain it at Court would entail a certain risk, as the de Rochambeau family knew him to be English.
However, he had made careful enquiries before leaving Paris and learned that the old Marquis had for the past year or more retired to his estates in Brittany, his son, Count Lucien, was with his regiment in Artois, and the beautiful Athenais, whom he had loved so desperately, was also living in Brittany with her husband, the Vicomte de la Tour d'Auvergne. There remained the factor that a number of the Marquis's friends would also almost certainly remember him, but he doubted if any of them had chapter and verse about his antecedents and felt reasonably confident that he would be able to fob off any inconvenient questions concerning his past with a convincing story.
So, having weighed the pros and cons of the matter, he had decided to continue using his soubriquet of M. le Chevalier de Breuc, thus allowing everyone to assume that he was a Frenchman, but to leave himself an open door in case of trouble by refraining from any definite statement that he was one. He was still far from happy in his mind about this uneasy compromise, but felt that it was the best at which he could arrive for the moment, and that it would be time enough to develop a more definite policy, according to events, if, and when, he could devise a way to be received behind those golden doors.
To walk in to a reception without knowing anyone there to whom he could address a single word would be to invite discovery and expulsion— if not actual arrest. So he had felt that his best hope lay in making the acquaintance at his fashionable inn of some well-placed courtier who would in due course invite his company to a levee or entertainment, on the assumption that he had already been presented; for, once inside, it was a hundred to one against the King remembering if he was one of the thousands of young nobles who had been presented to him in their teens or not.
But the trouble was that he had found no stool-pigeon suitable for such a manoeuvre staying at the inn; neither had one appeared since his arrival, and it looked as if he might kick his heels there for weeks before one did. Moreover, frequent walks in the grounds of the Chateau and many .hours spent lounging about its long, lofty corridors had equally failed to produce the type of chance acquaintance that he was seeking.
The factor that he had failed to take into his calculations when making this somewhat vague plan on his way from Paris was the election of Deputies to the States General. It was not only the People who were electing candidates to represent them in the Third Estate, but the First and Second—clergy and nobles—were not to sit by right of their episcopal ranks and hereditary titles; they too were to elect representatives from their own Orders. In consequence, for the first time in generations, nearly the whole nobility of France had gone to the provinces, where they were either intriguing to get themselves sent to Versailles as Deputies or supporting the candidates they favoured in their districts; so the Court and Fontainebleau were practically deserted.
Roger had been riding for well over an hour and, cudgel his wits as he would, could still see no way out of his difficulty, when up the long ride through the greenwood he saw a horseman coming towards him at a gentle canter. As the approaching figure grew nearer he could see it to be that of a lanky gentleman with narrow shoulders and a long, lean face, who appeared to be in his middle thirties. He was well mounted on a powerful bay but his dress, although of rich materials, was too flashy to be in good taste.
As the two horsemen came abreast both gave the casual nod which is habitual to strangers passing one another in the country, and as they did so each looked straight into the other's eyes for a moment without either showing any sign of recognition. Roger was still deeply absorbed by his own problem, and it was only after the lanky man had cantered on for a hundred yards or so that he began to wonder vaguely where he had seen that lantern-jawed countenance before.