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We both monkeyed with the machines an hour or two before we got them to rights. Then I went home. "'My wife and I laughed at the story at first, but when we came across it about every other week, it began to get rather stale. It was one of those canards that stick, and I shall be spoken of always as the man who forgot his wife within an hour after he was married.
His apologia, and the extent to which he had been wronged and misrepresented are matters outside the scope of these memoirs. But they shed a lurid light on the picturesque canards we swallowed and digested with an ease that any ostrich would envy. While engrossed in these denunciations of everything and everybody, Sunday glided by glided, for the pendulum was not so slow on Sundays.
"The local police are making active inquiries, I believe." "I wonder who it could have been?" Sir Bernard exclaimed reflectively. "Mrs. Courtenay was always so devoted to poor Henry, that the story of the stranger appears to me very like some invention of the villagers. Whenever a tragedy occurs in a rural district all kinds of absurd canards are started. Probably that's one of them.
"Adieu, canaux, canards, et canaille," which might be rendered into English thus: "Good bye, dikes, ducks, and Dutchmen." So I returned to my father's house, to be nursed by my sister, and to astonish the neighbours with the history of our wonderful achievements.
When the bourgeois king, Louis Philippe, succeeded to the elder branch, the gentilhomme Français entirely lost his prestige, and the necessity of his existence was ignored. Germain, and all who frequented it "les oies de Frère Philippe" or "les canards d'Orléans." The Count de Cambis appeared at that moment at the Tuileries in search of office.
The Queen was to be shot at; Balmoral was to be burned down; the armouries had been attacked; the barracks were undermined; the gas works were to be exploded, the Bank blown up, the water poisoned. Nothing was too infernal or too wicked for the Fenians, and every hour brought some addition to the monstrous stock of canards.
Voltaire was able to speak the famous words: "Adieu, canaux, canards, canaille;" but when he had to judge Holland seriously, he remembered that he had not found in its capital "an idle person, a poor, dissipated, or insolent man," and that he had everywhere seen "industry and modesty."
The newsboys were putting a good deal of feeling into their crying of special editions when I reached the streets again; but I was not inclined to waste further pence upon the Sunday News' moralizings over the evolution of canards. I took a mess of some adulterated pottage at a foreign restaurant in Notting Hill, as I had no wish to return to Bloomsbury before the Demonstration.
"Canards?" repeated Lucien. "That is our word for a scrap of fiction told for true, put in to enliven the column of morning news when it is flat. We owe the discovery to Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the lightning conductor and the republic. That journalist completely deceived the Encyclopaedists by his transatlantic canards.
He held that Caesar's wife was above suspicion because she was Caesar's wife, and that no canards posted at midnight could affect his faith in his wife or in his friend. He refused to believe that any coup d'etat was imminent, save the one which he himself meditated when he was ready to proclaim the country in a state of revolution, and to assume a military dictatorship.
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