"
"I shall certainly advise my master not to come himself, Sieur
Cadet," replied the chief clerk; "and I am very certain of returning
in three days with more army bills for the signature of his
Excellency the Intendant."
"Get out, you fool!" shouted Cadet, laughing at what he regarded the
insolence of the clerk. "You are worthy of your master!" And Cadet
pushed him forcibly out of the door, and shut it after him with a
bang that resounded through the Palace.
"Don't be angry at him, Bigot, he is not worth it," said Cadet.
"'Like master like man,' as the proverb says. And, after all, I
doubt whether the furred law-cats of the Parliament of Paris would
not uphold the Bourgeois in an appeal to them from the Golden Dog."
Bigot was excessively irritated, for he was lawyer enough to know
that Cadet's fear was well founded. He walked up and down his
cabinet, venting curses upon the heads of the whole party of the
Honnetes Gens, the Governor and Commander of the Forces included.
The Marquise de Pompadour, too, came in for a full share of his
maledictions, for Bigot knew that she had forced the signing of the
treaty of Aix la Chapelle,--influenced less by the exhaustion of
France than by a feminine dislike to camp life, which she had shared
with the King, and a resolution to withdraw him back to the gaieties
of the capital, where he would be wholly under her own eye and
influence.
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