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A Frenchman, a regular Parisian, an artist as witty as audacious, asked leave to shut himself up in the bullet in order to reach the moon and make a survey of the terrestrial satellite. This intrepid adventurer's name was Michel Ardan.
Here we are reminded on the one hand of the elfin food considered in a former chapter, to partake of which sealed the adventurer's fate and prevented him for ever from returning to his human home; and on the other hand of the ceremony of eating together which among so many nations has been part of the marriage rites.
In this place our adventurer's speech was drowned in the acclamations of the fox-hunters, who now triumphed in their turn, and hoicksed the speaker, exclaiming, "Well opened, Jowler to' un, to' un again, Sweetlips! hey, Merry, Whitefoot!" After a short interruption, he thus resumed his discourse:
Behind it Calendar's car clung as if towed by an invisible cable, never gaining, never losing, mutely testifying to the adventurer's unrelenting, grim determination to leave them no instant's freedom from surveillance, to keep for ever at their shoulders, watching his chance, biding his time with sinister patience until the moment when, wearied, their vigilance should relax....
It was a face that men turned to look at twice and shook their heads in doubt afterward a handsome, worn, secretive face, in as perfect control as the strings of an instrument under the bow of a great artist. It was the face of a man without purpose in life beyond the moment watchful, careful, remorselessly determined, an adventurer's asset, the dial-plate of a hidden machinery.
He raised his head. The room was one of familiar lineaments, whitewashed walls, a mat by the iron bed, an altar in the corner, linen with elaborate drawn-work on bureau and washstand. The blood poured upward to the young adventurer's face. Was this his room? Had he been ill and dreamed strange happenings? He freed his arms and sat up.
My visitor came all the way from Paris in this wretched weather and at some risk to himself to warn me against Etienne Cordel"; and thereupon I told Jacques the story, though without revealing the adventurer's identity. "The tale rings true," said he, "but we ought to be a match for the lawyer's cut-throats. 'Tis a pity that Cordel won't give us a chance of measuring swords with him."
"Yes," thought I, "you are no longer the solitary exile, or the persecuted daughter of a noble but ruined race; you are not even the bride of a man who must seek in foreign climes, through danger and through hardship, to repair a broken fortune and establish an adventurer's name!
Steve waved back and the two cruisers settled down to their forty-mile run along the shore, the Follow Me gliding smoothly along abaft the Adventurer's starboard beam. They sighted few other craft this morning, and, as there was a deal of sameness in the coast, the fellows settled down to various occupations.
The author, though partial to the Prince, whom he faithfully followed, seems to have been a fair and candid man, and well acquainted with the intrigues among the adventurer's council: 'Everybody was mightily taken with the Prince's figure and personal behaviour. There was but one voice about them.
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