“Bah,” said Beauchamp, “he played the prince very well.”
“Yes, for you who detest those unhappy princes, Beauchamp, and are always delighted to find fault with them; but not for me, who discover a gentleman by instinct, and who scent out an aristocratic family like a very bloodhound of heraldry.”
“Then you never believed in the principality?”
“Yes.—in the principality, but not in the prince.”
“Not so bad,” said Beauchamp; “still, I assure you, he passed very well with many people; I saw him at the ministers’ houses.”
“Ah, yes,” said Château-Renaud. “The idea of thinking ministers understand anything about princes!”
“There is something in what you have just said,” said Beauchamp, laughing.
“But,” said Debray to Beauchamp, “if I spoke to the president, you must have been with the procureur.”
“It was an impossibility; for the last week M. de Villefort has secluded himself. It is natural enough; this strange chain of domestic afflictions, followed by the no less strange death of his daughter——”
“Strange? What do you mean, Beauchamp?”
“Oh, yes; do you pretend that all this has been unobserved at the minister’s?” said Beauchamp, placing his eye-glass in his eye, where he tried to make it remain.
“My dear sir,” said Château-Renaud, “allow me to tell you that you do not understand that manœuvre with the eye-glass half so well as Debray. Give him a lesson, Debray.”
“Stay,” said Beauchamp, “surely I am not deceived.”
“What is it?”
“It is she!”
“Whom do you mean?”
“They said she had left.”