Alfred de Rosann by G.W.M. Reynolds — page 48: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Alfred de Rosann. 35 hotel, by a private auction. Having secured a considerable sum of money through the medium of this nefarious transaction, he was about to decamp, when the porter of the house, whom he had ex- pressly discharged the moment Monseigneur departed for his maison de campagne, apprized the venerable baron’s notary of Pierre Belle- Rose’s proceedings, and thus procured his prompt arrest. Con- veyed to Bicétre a second time, to be thence transported to Toulon, he was speedily recognised as a forgat evadé (a galley-slave who has escaped) from the prisons of Brest. This unpleasant disco- very was the cause of his person being again dragged before the Court of Assize, and an extra three years were tacked on to the five which the sentence of the court had already condemned him to pass at the galleys. To be brief, he escaped a second time with a person of the name of Ledoux, and managed to elude the vigilance of the police from that moment until about the period which marks the commencement of our tale. A swindling transaction, under peculiarly aggravating circuinstances, once more gave him into the grasp of justice, and we now find him on his road to Brest, doomed to reside there ten years, unless his good fortune or his cunning restore him to liberty ere the expiration of that period. In person Belle-Rose was indifferently well formed, being short and sturdy. His shoulders were of an uncommon width—his neck short— his complexion florid—and a broad grin of good humour, which not unfrequently lulled asleep the eye of suspicion, was per- petually on his countenance. Like all Frenchmen, he had a great deal of levity in his conversation ; and often amongst his dissipated aesociates at Paris had he maintained a general round of unceasing langhter, when he recounted the various exploits and espiegleries in which he had been the principal actor. Nerved witha certain phi- losophical indifference to passing events, even as prosperity or ad- versity affected himself, he recked but little for the galleys of Brest, so long as health and vigour were spared him; particularly since he ever cherished the sanguine hope of being enabled to effect his escape within a short period. Such was the individual to whom De Rosann was shackled. Immediately in front of him, and attached to another convict, was @ personage of quite a different character; and as they are both exceedingly necessary to the plan of this tale, we hope the reader will deign to pardon us, if we ‘‘ bestow a little more of our tedious- ness” upon him, as Dogberry has it, and request a moment's atten- tion to Monsieur Champignon,®* ex-restaurateur of the Boulevard du Temple, and in happier times a successful rival of the far-famed Cadran Bleu. Now the Cadran Bleu, as we must inform our English readers who have not been in Paris, and who have never read the novels of Paul de Kock nor Auguste Ricarde—but in these days, when the rage for travelling is so universal, few have not visited that gay city of luxury, pleasure, and delight—the Cadran Bleu, or Blue Clock, is a famous eating-house, where merchants in a small way, the more * The English of the word Chumptgnwn is “‘ Mushroom.” D2 COMRnIClooo SS (GO)