Yes, I trust I was of service to you /there/."

And Madame de Balzac then proceeded to favour me with the whole history
of the manner in which she had obtained the letter she had sent me,
accompanied by a thousand anathemas against those /atroces Jesuites/ and
a thousand eulogies on her own genius and virtues. I brought her from
this subject so interesting to herself, as soon as decorum would allow
me; and I then made inquiry if she knew aught of Oswald or could suggest
any mode of obtaining intelligence respecting him. Madame de Balzac
hated plain, blunt, blank questions, and she always travelled through a
wilderness of parentheses before she answered them. But at last I did
ascertain her answer, and found it utterly unsatisfactory. She had
never seen nor heard anything of Oswald since he had left her charged
with her commission to me. I then questioned her respecting the
character of the man, and found Mr. Marie Oswald had little to plume
himself upon in that respect. He seemed, however, from her account of
him, to be more a rogue than a villain; and from two or three stories of
his cowardice, which Madame de Balzac related, he appeared to me utterly
incapable of a design so daring and systematic as that of which it
pleased all persons who troubled themselves about my affairs to suspect
him.

Finding at last that no further information was to be gained on this
point, I turned the conversation to Montreuil. I found, from Madame de
Balzac's very abuse of him, that he enjoyed a great reputation in the
country and a great favour at court. He had been early befriended by
Father la Chaise, and he was now especially trusted and esteemed by the
successor of that Jesuit Le Tellier,--Le Tellier, that rigid and bigoted
servant of Loyola, the sovereign of the king himself, the destroyer of
the Port Royal, and the mock and terror of the bedevilled and persecuted