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Updated: May 29, 2025
I inquired in an idle sort of way. "Yes. I was in the confidence of Bardelys, and one night after we had supped at his hotel one of those suppers graced by every wit in Paris he asked me if I were minded to accompany him to the Louvre. We went. A masque was in progress."
I was near to committing the egregious blunder of laughing in his face, but, recollecting myself betimes, I answered vaguely that I had some knowledge of it, whereupon he all but caused me to bound from my chair by asking me had I ever met the Magnificent Bardelys. "I I am acquainted with him," I answered warily. "Why do you ask?"
The air became suddenly heavy with the scent of musk, and the Chevalier de Saint-Eustache stood before us, and forced the conversation once more upon the odious topic of Monsieur de Bardelys. The poor fool came with a plan of campaign carefully considered, bent now upon overthrowing me with the knowledge he would exhibit, and whereby he looked to encompass my humiliation before his cousin.
He was a man of some forty years of age, born into my father's service, and since become my intendant, factotum, majordomo, and generalissimo of my regiment of servants and my establishments both in Paris and at Bardelys. We had been to the wars together ere I had cut my wisdom teeth, and thus had he come to love me. There was nothing this invaluable servant could not do.
"Why, yes," I answered slowly, after the manner of one who deliberates, "if you are persuaded that your conclusions touching Bardelys are correct." "I am more than persuaded. What other business could bring him to Lavedan?" It was a question that I did not attempt to answer. Haply he did not expect me to answer it.
Then resuming the calm with which hitherto I had addressed him, "Your cupidity," said I, "your greed for the estates of Bardelys, and your jealousy and thirst to see me impoverished and so ousted from my position at Court, to leave you supreme in His Majesty's favour, have put you to strange shifts for a gentleman, Chatellerault. Yet, wait." And, dipping my pen in the ink-horn, I began to write.
Even if she forgave all else, could she forgive me for being Bardelys the notorious Bardelys, the libertine, the rake, some of whose exploits she had heard of from her mother, painted a hundred times blacker than they really were? Might she not shrink from me when I told her I was that man?
"How could you have lent yourself to such a bargain?" was her next question. "How, indeed?" I asked in my turn. "From your mother you have heard something of the reputation that attaches to Bardelys. I was a man of careless ways, satiated with all the splendours life could give me, nauseated by all its luxuries. Was it wonderful that I allowed myself to be lured into this affair?
Then, in a voice forcedly calm like the calm of Nature when thunder is brewing he asked me, "Who do you insist that you are, monsieur?" "Once already have I told you, and I venture to think that mine is a name not easily forgotten. I am the Sieur Marcel de Saint-Pol, Marquis of Bardelys, of Bardelys in Picardy." A cunning grin parted his thin lips. "Have you any witnesses to identify you?"
"If to have begun your career of dalliance at the age of eighteen with an amour that resulted in a scandal be your title to experience, I agree," said he. "But for the rest, Bardelys, for all your fine talk of conquering women, believe me when I tell you that in all your life you have never met a woman, for I deny the claim of these Court creatures to that title.
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