Then that awful smile, that missing tooth.

He reached his long arm to my hammock and dragged down my rabbit rug. From beneath the mattress he took a steel-shanked awl.

He planned to stab the doctor now, so I thought.

He whispered to me, " Rio."

So we would do a bunk. I let him know I understood. I had the stone in my pocket with his portrait on it. It was my only gift, my only wealth, my only thing to give. He took my rabbit-skin rug and held it this way and that, as if I were a bull to fight. Then he was a magician. He sat cross-legged at the head of his bunk, demonstrating how the awl could unstitch a doubled pelt inside which, snug as a wallet, was a sheaf of Piggott's five-pound notes.

"Pour moi," he whispered, and slipped the money down inside his pants. This trick he repeated three more times and when he was done, he took my hand and made me carefully feel the rug. Rabbit skins, as I am sure you know, are crinkly by nature, but now he led me to a place where the pelts were doubled and the crinkly feel must be accounted for by more than rough-cured skin.

"Pour toi," he whispered in my ear. "For you."

He was holding my shoulders and looking at me very fond and I suddenly knew that he was about to run away and leave me.

In anguish, I produced my treasure and thrust it in his hand.

He accepted it with perfect understanding, so I thought. He held me up and looked at me as if I were a fish he had just caught.

"Very fine," he said. He pursed his lips to make me quiet and then he brought my ear to his mouth. "I come back, comprenez. I return."

I looked into his pale spy's eyes, strangely moist and filled with all the light the porthole would allow.

Two days later I would stand at that same porthole and watch the bumboat as it set off for shore with Monsieur and Dr. Bingham both aboard. They toiled toward Sugar Loaf; then, at a certain point, the sailors raised their oars, and the boat was swept back to the left and the Marquis de Tilbot was gone.

"I come back. I promise." But who could trust his tears?

IT WAS AN AUTUMN MORNING in New York when our peculiar little party gathered to one side of the entrance of the Tombs where-a low pawnshop being conveniently placed opposite the prison doors-the sun had been provided a pathway between the grim warehouses on the eastern side of Centre Street. The pawnshop lay squat and mangy, barred iron teeth unchained and its boy or apprentice was stirring up a disgusting cloud of dust, which drifted into the shadows before settling down again.

The leading actors of our company were Mr. O'Hara (who had been my guide), the banker Mr. Peek (my fellow passenger and friend), the servant's paramour, the paramour's maman, and of course that twenty-five-year-old noble, previously of no reputation even in Versailles, who was now known to all New York as The French Commissioner. That is, myself, Olivier de Garmont.

In addition to those previously mentioned, our siege was abetted by a great number of top-hatted gentlemen-mayors, governors, commissioners whose names I have since forgotten. If you had been passing in your wagon or glancing out your countinghouse window, you might have reasonably assumed you had chanced upon Old Europe Taught a Lesson by Young Democracy.

The commissioner was always-whether on Centre Street, in a Pearl Street oyster house or a horsedrawn omnibus-the honored representative of his great nation. Of this he was continually aware, and I can promise that he, in no way-neither by his dress or manner nor his slightly narrowed eyes-revealed that he was freshly emerged from a night of horrors. For he-who had spent almost his entire life a student of his own noble Garmont courage, his Barfleur glory, having prepared himself to rebuff the citoyens from Paris-he, Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont, with no other thought but that he, The French Commissioner, must not figure in a public scandal, had stood by while his own servant had been unjustly arrested.

So I confess. The awful Jean-Jacques Rousseau could not be more embarrassing. I, my father's son, had slunk away from the mob like a cat in a storm, my clothes torn, my papers scattered, skirting the brothels of Murray Street, past the College of Columbia, back around the block. All the way up Broadway, facing the fierce inquiry of the gaslights, I persisted with my justification-that it was for the glory of our nation that I ran away. I would have crawled into my bed like a weary innocent, had I not been confronted, on my return to the boardinghouse, by O'Hara.

I had kept him waiting half a bottle, far too long.

I was clearly in the wrong, but I did expect a cultivation, particularly from one who so despised his countrymen's lack of manners.

Once in my rooms, he listened to me very calmly as I explained that I had misplaced his pistol. He stroked his handsome beard and nodded, at first. But then he changed dramatically. One could blame the Madeira, possibly, or some hairline flaw in the marble of his character, which, suffering new pressure from a new direction, split the whole asunder.

One moment he was nodding sagely. The next-good heavens-this huge fellow hurled his entire manly body on my sofa, falling like a cow dropped from a window. He yelped. His arm was broke. His tail was docked. He howled as if caught in a trap, and my neighbors were soon thumping on their floors and walls and ceilings. After two hours-the like of which I wish never to endure again-I had quieted him, and persuaded the timid night porter that he had the authority to give my friend a room and place it on my account.

Beholding O'Hara outside the Tombs next morning, with his mustache freshly waxed and his hair a glistening wave of fresh pomade, you would never, not for a second, guess what he had confessed to me. That pistol had never been his to lend. It had been borrowed from a certain Mr. Astor on the understanding that he, O'Hara, would have it polished by a gunsmith he highly recommended. In other words, he was a scoundrel.

But there he was, basking in the sunshine on Centre Street, as upright as a senator. The morning had begun very early and by this time, as he consulted his gold fob watch, Mr. Astor's pistol was retrieved and was the source of no more public shame than a slight bulge disturbing his tightly tailored jacket. So O'Hara had been made whole, as the New York lawyers say, and he was engaging old Peek on that subject about which the people of Manhattan display more learning than any burghers of any other city on this earth, to wit, the price of property in Manhattan.

We were all waiting, of course, for the release of Monsieur Perroquet from imprisonment inside the Tombs. It was an event impossible to conceive in France, for I obtained this justice-and justice it was-with the distribution of dollars, not my own dollars either but those borrowed from Mr. Peek, who had personally arranged that the watchman-disrespectfully called a leather head on account of his helmet-be tipped and the two prison warders be tipped and certain other institutions be given a gift, and you would think this such a truly disgusting matter that it needs be transacted in the dead of night, but no. The beneficiaries had come straight from their homes or counting-houses, the otherwise elegant Mr. Peek carrying a small dot of egg yolk on his dimpled chin. Here they were, the Great and the Good of New York, intent on performing a charitable function.

The two Frenchwomen waited away from the swath of sunshine, nearest to the small door through which Mr. Peek's emissary, a lawyer and comic novelist of some local renown, had disappeared. Although the females were occupied with nothing more than waiting, they exhibited that strange intensity I had observed the night before, when I had lifted my curtain to distract myself from O'Hara's sniveling. I looked down on great Broadway, as quiet and provincial as the rue d'Anjou, and found just two human forms, two women, one in gray, the other in blue, staring directly at my lighted window.