Lagardere answered him, gravely: "Not a laugh. I waited for Nevers one
evening outside the Louvre and saluted him. 'Sir,' I said, in my grandest
manner, 'I rely upon your courtesy to give me a moonlight lesson in your
secret thrust.' Lord, how he started. 'Who the devil are you?' says he. I
made him a magnificent bow. 'I am Henri de Lagardere, of the king's
Light-Horse. I am always in trouble, always in debt, always in love.
These are misfortunes a man can endure. But I am always hearing of your
merits, which is fretting, and of your irresistible secret thrust, and
that is unbearable.'"
Lagardere paused to give dramatic effect to the point in his narrative.
"What did he say to that?" asked Passepoil.
Lagardere went on: "'Ah,' said the duke, 'you are the fellow they call
handsome Lagardere'" (Lagardere interrupted the flow of his story with a
pathetic parenthesis--"I can't help it, they do call me so"); "'people
talk too much about you, and that wearies me'; which shows that he had a
touch of my complaint. Well, he was civility itself. We went down by the
church of St.-Germain, and had scarcely crossed swords when the point of
his rapier pricked me here, just between the eyes. I was touched--I,
Lagardere--and if I had not leaped backward I should have been a dead
man. 'That is my secret thrust,' says the duke with a smile, and wished
me good-evening."
V