“Thanks for the preference! You make a strange advocate, Gourville, to-day — the advocate of the Abbe Fouquet!”

“Eh! but everything and every man has a good side — their useful side, monseigneur.”

“The bandits whom the abbe keeps in pay and drink have their useful side, have they? Prove that, if you please.”

“Let the circumstance arise, monseigneur, and you will be very glad to have these bandits under your hand.”

“You advise me, then, to be reconciled to the abbe?” said Fouquet, ironically.

“I advise you, monseigneur, not to quarrel with a hundred or a hundred and twenty loose fellows, who, by putting their rapiers end to end, would form a cordon of steel capable of surrounding three thousand men.”