M. des Amis frowned, stroking his square chin.
"You ran away?"
“You may say so."
"A coward, eh?"
“I don’t think so." And then he lied romantically. Surely a man who lived by the sword should have a weakness for the romantic. “My enemy is a swordsman of great strength — the best blade in the province, if not the best blade in France. I thought I would come to Paris to learn something of the art, and then go back and kill him. You see, I have not the means to take lessons otherwise.
“I thought to find work here in the law. But I have failed. There are too many lawyers in Paris as it is, and whilst waiting I have consumed the little money that I had, so that ... so that, enfin,* your notice seemed to me something to which a special providence had directed me.”
M. des Amis gripped him by the shoulders, and looked into his face. “Is this true, my friend?” he asked.
“Not a word of it,” said André-Louis, wrecking his chances on an irresistible impulse to say the unexpected.*
But he didn’t wreck them. M. des Amis burst into laughter; and having laughed his fill, confessed himself charmed by his applicant’s fundamental honesty.
* French for ‘in the end’, ‘at any rate’.
* Clearly, the whole truth would never do. If André had been telling the whole truth he would have started by saying that he was a wanted man in Paris, on a charge of sedition, owing to his revolutionary activities. He might then have explained that he wasn’t really a political agitator, but had got involved in order to unmask the man who murdered his friend Philippe in a duel. He might have told M. des Amis that his most recent profession had not been lawyer, but that of actor, playing Scaramouche in an itinerant commedia dell’arte troupe. At this point he might have named the master swordsman who killed Philippe as the powerful Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr; but long before this M. des Amis would have thrown him out.