"How can I earn my living here?"

"They are going, I think, to establish a mutual insurance agency in
Issoudun, for the department of the Cher; you might get a place in it,
but the pay won't be more than fifty francs a month at the outside."

"That will be enough."

At the end of a week Philippe had a new suit of clothes,--coat,
waistcoat, and trousers,--of good blue Elbeuf cloth, bought on credit,
to be paid for at so much a month; also new boots, buckskin gloves,
and a hat. Giroudeau sent him some linen, with his weapons and a
letter for Carpentier, who had formerly served under Giroudeau. The
letter secured him Carpentier's good-will, and the latter presented
him to his friend Mignonnet as a man of great merit and the highest
character. Philippe won the admiration of these worthy officers by
confiding to them a few facts about the late conspiracy, which was, as
everybody knows, the last attempt of the old army against the
Bourbons; for the affair of the sergeants at La Rochelle belongs to
another order of ideas.

Warned by the fate of the conspiracy of the 19th of August, 1820, and
of those of Berton and Caron, the soldiers of the old army resigned
themselves, after their failure in 1822, to await events. This last
conspiracy, which grew out of that of the 19th of August, was really a
continuation of the latter, carried on by a better element. Like its
predecessor, it was absolutely unknown to the royal government.
Betrayed once more, the conspirators had the wit to reduce their vast
enterprise to the puny proportions of a barrack plot. This conspiracy,