"Well?" she asked of Schmucke, "has this cherub of ours had plenty to drink? Is he better?"

"He is not doing fery vell, tear Montame Zipod, not fery vell," said poor Schmucke, brushing away the tears from his eyes.

"Pooh! you make too much of it, my dear M. Schmucke; we must take things as we find them; Cibot might be at death's door, and I should not take it to heart as you do. Come! the cherub has a good constitution. And he has been steady, it seems, you see; you have no idea what an age sober people live. He is very ill, it is true, but with all the care I take of him, I shall bring him round. Be easy, look after your affairs, I will keep him company and see that he drinks his pints of barley water."

"Gif you vere not here, I should die of anxiety—" said Schmucke, squeezing his kind housekeeper's hand in both his own to express his confidence in her.

La Cibot wiped her eyes as she went back to the invalid's room.

"What is the matter, Mme. Cibot?" asked Pons.

"It is M. Schmucke that has upset me; he is crying as if you were dead," said she. "If you are not well, you are not so bad yet that nobody need cry over you; but it has given me such a turn! Oh dear! oh dear! how silly it is of me to get so fond of people, and to think more of you than of Cibot! For, after all, you aren't nothing to me, you are only my brother by Adam's side; and yet, whenever you are in the question, it puts me in such a taking, upon my word it does! I would cut off my hand—my left hand, of course—to see you coming and going, eating your meals, and screwing bargains out of dealers as usual. If I had had a child of my own, I think I should have loved it as I love you, eh! There, take a drink, dearie; come now, empty the glass. Drink it off, monsieur, I tell you! The first thing Dr. Poulain said was, 'If M. Pons has no mind to go to Pere Lachaise, he ought to drink as many buckets full of water in a day as an Auvergnat will sell.' So, come now, drink—"

"But I do drink, Cibot, my good woman; I drink and drink till I am deluged—"

"That is right," said the portress, as she took away the empty glass. "That is the way to get better. Dr. Poulain had another patient ill of your complaint; but he had nobody to look after him, his children left him to himself, and he died because he didn't drink enough—so you must drink, honey, you see—he died and they buried him two months ago. And if you were to die, you know, you would drag down old M. Schmucke with you, sir. He is like a child. Ah! he loves you, he does, the dear lamb of a man; no woman never loved a man like that! He doesn't care for meat nor drink; he has grown as thin as you are in the last fortnight, and you are nothing but skin and bones.—It makes me jealous to see it, for I am very fond of you; but not to that degree; I haven't lost my appetite, quite the other way; always going up and down stairs, till my legs are so tired that I drop down of an evening like a lump of lead. Here am I neglecting my poor Cibot for you; Mlle. Remonencq cooks his victuals for him, and he goes on about it and says that nothing is right! At that I tell him that one ought to put up with something for the sake of other people, and that you are so ill that I cannot leave you. In the first place, you can't afford a nurse. And before I would have a nurse here!—I have done for you these ten years; they want wine and sugar, and foot-warmers, and all sorts of comforts. And they rob their patients unless the patients leave them something in their wills. Have a nurse in here to-day, and to-morrow we should find a picture or something or other gone—"

"Oh! Mme. Cibot!" cried Pons, quite beside himself, "do not leave me! No one must touch anything—"

"I am here," said La Cibot; "so long as I have the strength I shall be here.—Be easy. There was Dr. Poulain wanting to get a nurse for you; perhaps he has his eye on your treasures. I just snubbed him, I did. 'The gentleman won't have any one but me,' I told him. 'He is used to me, and I am used to him.' So he said no more. A nurse, indeed! They are all thieves; I hate that sort of woman, I do. Here is a tale that will show you how sly they are. There was once an old gentleman—it was Dr. Poulain himself, mind you, who told me this—well, a Mme. Sabatier, a woman of thirty-six that used to sell slippers at the Palais Royal—you remember the Galerie at the Palais that they pulled down?"

Pons nodded.

"Well, at that time she had not done very well; her husband used to drink, and died of spontaneous imbustion; but she had been a fine woman in her time, truth to tell, not that it did her any good, though she had friends among the lawyers. So, being hard up, she became a monthly nurse, and lived in the Rue Barre-du-Bec. Well, she went out to nurse an old gentleman that had a disease of the lurinary guts (saving your presence); they used to tap him like an artesian well, and he needed such care that she used to sleep on a truckle-bed in the same room with him. You would hardly believe such a thing!—'Men respect nothing,' you'll tell me, 'so selfish as they are.' Well, she used to talk with him, you understand; she never left him, she amused him, she told him stories, she drew him on to talk (just as we are chatting away together now, you and I, eh?), and she found out that his nephews—the old gentleman had nephews—that his nephews were wretches; they had worried him, and final end of it, they had brought on this illness. Well, my dear sir, she saved his life, he married her, and they have a fine child; Ma'am Bordevin, the butcher's wife in the Rue Charlot, a relative of hers, stood godmother. There is luck for you!

"As for me, I am married; and if I have no children, I don't mind saying that it is Cibot's fault; he is too fond of me, but if I cared—never mind. What would have become of me and my Cibot if we had had a family, when we have not a penny to bless ourselves with after thirty years' of faithful service? I have not a farthing belonging to nobody else, that is what comforts me. I have never wronged nobody.—Look here, suppose now (there is no harm in supposing when you will be out and about again in six weeks' time, and sauntering along the boulevard); well, suppose that you had put me down in your will; very good, I shouldn't never rest till I had found your heirs and given the money back. Such is my horror of anything that is not earned by the sweat of my brow.

"You will say to me, 'Why, Mme. Cibot, why should you worry yourself like that? You have fairly earned the money; you looked after your two gentlemen as if they had been your children; you saved them a thousand francs a year—' (for there are plenty, sir, you know, that would have had their ten thousand francs put out to interest by now if they had been in my place)—'so if the worthy gentleman leaves you a trifle of an annuity, it is only right.'—Suppose they told me that. Well, now; I am not thinking of myself.—I cannot think how some women can do a kindness thinking of themselves all the time. It is not doing good, sir, is it? I do not go to church myself, I haven't the time; but my conscience tells me what is right.... Don't you fidget like that, my lamb!—Don't scratch yourself!... Dear me, how yellow you grow! So yellow you are—quite brown. How funny it is that one can come to look like a lemon in three weeks!... Honesty is all that poor folk have, and one must surely have something! Suppose that you were just at death's door, I should be the first to tell you that you ought to leave all that you have to M. Schmucke. It is your duty, for he is all the family you have. He loves you, he does, as a dog loves his master."

"Ah! yes," said Pons; "nobody else has ever loved me all my life long—"

"Ah! that is not kind of you, sir," said Mme. Cibot; "then I do not love you, I suppose?"

"I do not say so, my dear Mme. Cibot."

"Good. You take me for a servant, do you, a common servant, as if I hadn't no heart! Goodness me! for eleven years you do for two old bachelors, you think of nothing but their comfort. I have turned half a score of greengrocers' shops upside down for you, I have talked people round to get you good Brie cheese; I have gone down as far as the market for fresh butter for you; I have taken such care of things that nothing of yours hasn't been chipped nor broken in all these ten years; I have just treated you like my own children; and then to hear a 'My dear Mme. Cibot,' that shows that there is not a bit of feeling for you in the heart of an old gentleman that you have cared for like a king's son! for the little King of Rome was not so well looked after. He died in his prime; there is proof for you.... Come, sir, you are unjust! You are ungrateful! It is because I am only a poor portress. Goodness me! are you one of those that think we are dogs?—"

"But, my dear Mme. Cibot—"

"Indeed, you that know so much, tell me why we porters are treated like this, and are supposed to have no feelings; people look down on us in these days when they talk of Equality!—As for me, am I not as good as another woman, I that was one of the finest women in Paris, and was called La belle Ecaillere, and received declarations seven or eight times a day? And even now if I liked—Look here, sir, you know that little scrubby marine store-dealer downstairs? Very well, he would marry me any day, if I were a widow that is, with his eyes shut; he has had them looking wide open in my direction so often; he is always saying, 'Oh! what fine arms you have, Ma'am Cibot!—I dreamed last night that it was bread and I was butter, and I was spread on the top.' Look, sir, there is an arm!"

She rolled up her sleeve and displayed the shapeliest arm imaginable, as white and fresh as her hand was red and rough; a plump, round, dimpled arm, drawn from its merino sheath like a blade from the scabbard to dazzle Pons, who looked away.

"For every oyster the knife opened, the arm has opened a heart! Well, it belongs to Cibot, and I did wrong when I neglected him, poor dear, HE would throw himself over a precipice at a word from me; while you, sir, that call me 'My dear Mme. Cibot' when I do impossible things for you—"

"Do just listen to me," broke in the patient; "I cannot call you my mother, nor my wife—"

"No, never in all my born days will I take again to anybody—"

"Do let me speak!" continued Pons. "Let me see; I put M. Schmucke first—"

"M. Schmucke! there is a heart for you," cried La Cibot. "Ah! he loves me, but then he is poor. It is money that deadens the heart; and you are rich! Oh, well, take a nurse, you will see what a life she will lead you; she will torment you, you will be like a cockchafer on a string. The doctor will say that you must have plenty to drink, and she will do nothing but feed you. She will bring you to your grave and rob you. You do not deserve to have a Mme. Cibot!—there! When Dr. Poulain comes, ask him for a nurse."

"Oh fiddlestickend!" the patient cried angrily. "Will you listen to me? When I spoke of my friend Schmucke, I was not thinking of women. I know quite well that no one cares for me so sincerely as you do, you and Schmucke—"

"Have the goodness not to irritate yourself in this way!" exclaimed La Cibot, plunging down upon Pons and covering him by force with the bedclothes.

"How should I not love you?" said poor Pons.

"You love me, really?... There, there, forgive me, sir!" she said, crying and wiping her eyes. "Ah, yes, of course, you love me, as you love a servant, that is the way!—a servant to whom you throw an annuity of six hundred francs like a crust you fling into a dog's kennel—"

"Oh! Mme. Cibot," cried Pons, "for what do you take me? You do not know me."

"Ah! you will care even more than that for me," she said, meeting Pons' eyes. "You will love your kind old Cibot like a mother, will you not? A mother, that is it! I am your mother; you are both of you my children.... Ah, if I only knew them that caused you this sorrow, I would do that which would bring me into the police-courts, and even to prison; I would tear their eyes out! Such people deserve to die at the Barriere Saint-Jacques, and that is too good for such scoundrels. ... So kind, so good as you are (for you have a heart of gold), you were sent into the world to make some woman happy!... Yes, you would have her happy, as anybody can see; you were cut out for that. In the very beginning, when I saw how you were with M. Schmucke, I said to myself, 'M. Pons has missed the life he was meant for; he was made to be a good husband.' Come, now, you like women."

"Ah, yes," said Pons, "and no woman has been mine."

"Really?" exclaimed La Cibot, with a provocative air as she came nearer and took Pons' hand in hers. "Do you not know what it is to love a woman that will do anything for her lover? Is it possible? If I were in your place, I should not wish to leave this world for another until I had known the greatest happiness on earth!... Poor dear! If I was now what I was once, I would leave Cibot for you! upon my word, I would! Why, with a nose shaped like that—for you have a fine nose—how did you manage it, poor cherub?... You will tell me that 'not every woman knows a man when she sees him'; and a pity it is that they marry so at random as they do, it makes you sorry to see it.—Now, for my own part, I should have thought that you had had mistresses by the dozen—dancers, actresses, and duchesses, for you went out so much. ... When you went out, I used to say to Cibot, 'Look! there is M. Pons going a-gallivanting,' on my word, I did, I was so sure that women ran after you. Heaven made you for love.... Why, my dear sir, I found that out the first day that you dined at home, and you were so touched with M. Schmucke's pleasure. And next day M. Schmucke kept saying to me, 'Montame Zipod, he haf tined hier,' with the tears in his eyes, till I cried along with him like a fool, as I am. And how sad he looked when you took to gadding abroad again and dining out! Poor man, you never saw any one so disconsolate! Ah! you are quite right to leave everything to him. Dear worthy man, why he is as good as a family to you, he is! Do not forget him; for if you do, God will not receive you into his Paradise, for those that have been ungrateful to their friends and left them no rentes will not go to heaven."

In vain Pons tried to put in a word; La Cibot talked as the wind blows. Means of arresting steam-engines have been invented, but it would tax a mechanician's genius to discover any plan for stopping a portress' tongue.

"I know what you mean," continued she. "But it does not kill you, my dear gentleman, to make a will when you are out of health; and in your place I might not leave that poor dear alone, for fear that something might happen; he is like God Almighty's lamb, he knows nothing about nothing, and I should not like him to be at the mercy of those sharks of lawyers and a wretched pack of relations. Let us see now, has one of them come here to see you in twenty years? And would you leave your property to them? Do you know, they say that all these things here are worth something."

"Why, yes," said Pons.

"Remonencq, who deals in pictures, and knows that you are an amateur, says that he would be quite ready to pay you an annuity of thirty thousand francs so long as you live, to have the pictures afterwards. ... There is a change! If I were you, I should take it. Why, I thought he said it for a joke when he told me that. You ought to let M. Schmucke know the value of all those things, for he is a man that could be cheated like a child. He has not the slightest idea of the value of these fine things that you have! He so little suspects it, that he would give them away for a morsel of bread if he did not keep them all his life for love of you, always supposing that he lives after you, for he will die of your death. But I am here; I will take his part against anybody and everybody!... I and Cibot will defend him."

"Dear Mme. Cibot!" said Pons, "what would have become of me if it had not been for you and Schmucke?" He felt touched by this horrible prattle; the feeling in it seemed to be ingenuous, as it usually is in the speech of the people.

"Ah! we really are your only friends on earth, that is very true, that is. But two good hearts are worth all the families in the world.—Don't talk of families to me! A family, as the old actor said of the tongue, is the best and the worst of all things.... Where are those relations of yours now? Have you any? I have never seen them—"

"They have brought me to lie here," said Pons, with intense bitterness.

"So you have relations!..." cried La Cibot, springing up as if her easy-chair had been heated red-hot. "Oh, well, they are a nice lot, are your relations! What! these three weeks—for this is the twentieth day, to-day, that you have been ill and like to die—in these three weeks they have not come once to ask for news of you? That's a trifle too strong, that is!... Why, in your place, I would leave all I had to the Foundling Hospital sooner than give them one farthing!"

"Well, my dear Mme. Cibot, I meant to leave all that I had to a cousin once removed, the daughter of my first cousin, President Camusot, you know, who came here one morning nearly two months ago."

"Oh! a little stout man who sent his servants to beg your pardon—for his wife's blunder?—The housemaid came asking me questions about you, an affected old creature she is, my fingers itched to give her velvet tippet a dusting with my broom handle! A servant wearing a velvet tippet! did anybody ever see the like? No, upon my word, the world is turned upside down; what is the use of making a Revolution? Dine twice a day if you can afford it, you scamps of rich folk! But laws are no good, I tell you, and nothing will be safe if Louis-Philippe does not keep people in their places; for, after all, if we are all equal, eh, sir? a housemaid didn't ought to have a velvet tippet, while I, Mme. Cibot, haven't one, after thirty years of honest work.—There is a pretty thing for you! People ought to be able to tell who you are. A housemaid is a housemaid, just as I myself am a portress. Why do they have silk epaulettes in the army? Let everybody keep their place. Look here, do you want me to tell you what all this comes to? Very well, France is going to the dogs.... If the Emperor had been here, things would have been very different, wouldn't they, sir?... So I said to Cibot, I said, 'See here, Cibot, a house where the servants wear velvet tippets belongs to people that have no heart in them—'"

"No heart in them, that is just it," repeated Pons. And with that he began to tell Mme. Cibot about his troubles and mortifications, she pouring out abuse of the relations the while and showing exceeding tenderness on every fresh sentence in the sad history. She fairly wept at last.

To understand the sudden intimacy between the old musician and Mme. Cibot, you have only to imagine the position of an old bachelor lying on his bed of pain, seriously ill for the first time in his life. Pons felt that he was alone in the world; the days that he spent by himself were all the longer because he was struggling with the indefinable nausea of a liver complaint which blackens the brightest life. Cut off from all his many interests, the sufferer falls a victim to a kind of nostalgia; he regrets the many sights to be seen for nothing in Paris. The isolation, the darkened days, the suffering that affects the mind and spirits even more than the body, the emptiness of the life,—all these things tend to induce him to cling to the human being who waits on him as a drowned man clings to a plank; and this especially if the bachelor patient's character is as weak as his nature is sensitive and incredulous.

Pons was charmed to hear La Cibot's tittle-tattle. Schmucke, Mme. Cibot, and Dr. Poulain meant all humanity to him now, when his sickroom became the universe. If invalid's thoughts, as a rule, never travel beyond in the little space over which his eyes can wander; if their selfishness, in its narrow sphere, subordinates all creatures and all things to itself, you can imagine the lengths to which an old bachelor may go. Before three weeks were out he had even gone so far as to regret, once and again, that he had not married Madeleine Vivet! Mme. Cibot, too, had made immense progress in his esteem in those three weeks; without her he felt that he should have been utterly lost; for as for Schmucke, the poor invalid looked upon him as a second Pons. La Cibot's prodigious art consisted in expressing Pons' own ideas, and this she did quite unconsciously.

"Ah! here comes the doctor!" she exclaimed, as the bell rang, and away she went, knowing very well that Remonencq had come with the Jew.

"Make no noise, gentlemen," said she, "he must not know anything. He is all on the fidget when his precious treasures are concerned."

"A walk round will be enough," said the Hebrew, armed with a magnifying-glass and a lorgnette.

The greater part of Pons' collection was installed in a great old-fashioned salon such as French architects used to build for the old noblesse; a room twenty-five feet broad, some thirty feet in length, and thirteen in height. Pons' pictures to the number of sixty-seven hung upon the white-and-gold paneled walls; time, however, had reddened the gold and softened the white to an ivory tint, so that the whole was toned down, and the general effect subordinated to the effect of the pictures. Fourteen statues stood on pedestals set in the corners of the room, or among the pictures, or on brackets inlaid by Boule; sideboards of carved ebony, royally rich, surrounded the walls to elbow height, all the shelves filled with curiosities; in the middle of the room stood a row of carved credence-tables, covered with rare miracles of handicraft—with ivories and bronzes, wood-carvings and enamels, jewelry and porcelain.

As soon as Elie Magus entered the sanctuary, he went straight to the four masterpieces; he saw at a glance that these were the gems of Pons' collection, and masters lacking in his own. For Elie Magus these were the naturalist's desiderata for which men undertake long voyages from east to west, through deserts and tropical countries, across southern savannahs, through virgin forests.

The first was a painting by Sebastian del Piombo, the second a Fra Bartolommeo della Porta, the third a Hobbema landscape, and the fourth and last a Durer—a portrait of a woman. Four diamonds indeed! In the history of art, Sebastian del Piombo is like a shining point in which three schools meet, each bringing its pre-eminent qualities. A Venetian painter, he came to Rome to learn the manner of Raphael under the direction of Michael Angelo, who would fain oppose Raphael on his own ground by pitting one of his own lieutenants against the reigning king of art. And so it came to pass that in Del Piombo's indolent genius Venetian color was blended with Florentine composition and a something of Raphael's manner in the few pictures which he deigned to paint, and the sketches were made for him, it is said, by Michael Angelo himself.

If you would see the perfection to which the painter attained (armed as he was with triple power), go to the Louvre and look at the Baccio Bandinelli portrait; you might place it beside Titian's Man with a Glove, or by that other Portrait of an Old Man in which Raphael's consummate skill blends with Correggio's art; or, again, compare it with Leonardo da Vinci's Charles VIII., and the picture would scarcely lose. The four pearls are equal; there is the same lustre and sheen, the same rounded completeness, the same brilliancy. Art can go no further than this. Art has risen above Nature, since Nature only gives her creatures a few brief years of life.

Pons possessed one example of this immortal great genius and incurably indolent painter; it was a Knight of Malta, a Templar kneeling in prayer. The picture was painted on slate, and in its unfaded color and its finish was immeasurably finer than the Baccio Bandinelli.

Fra Bartolommeo was represented by a Holy Family, which many connoisseurs might have taken for a Raphael. The Hobbema would have fetched sixty thousand francs at a public sale; and as for the Durer, it was equal to the famous Holzschuer portrait at Nuremberg for which the kings of Bavaria, Holland, and Prussia have vainly offered two hundred thousand francs again and again. Was it the portrait of the wife or the daughter of Holzschuer, Albrecht Durer's personal friend?—The hypothesis seems to be a certainty, for the attitude of the figure in Pons' picture suggests that it is meant for a pendant, the position of the coat-of-arms is the same as in the Nuremberg portrait; and, finally, the oetatis suoe XLI. accords perfectly with the age inscribed on the picture religiously kept by the Holzschuers of Nuremberg, and but recently engraved.

The tears stood in Elie Magus' eyes as he looked from one masterpiece to another. He turned round to La Cibot, "I will give you a commission of two thousand francs on each of the pictures if you can arrange that I shall have them for forty thousand francs," he said. La Cibot was amazed at this good fortune dropped from the sky. Admiration, or, to be more accurate, delirious joy, had wrought such havoc in the Jew's brain, that it had actually unsettled his habitual greed, and he fell headlong into enthusiasm, as you see.

"And I?——" put in Remonencq, who knew nothing about pictures.

"Everything here is equally good," the Jew said cunningly, lowering his voice for Remonencq's ears; "take ten pictures just as they come and on the same conditions. Your fortune will be made."

Again the three thieves looked each other in the face, each one of them overcome with the keenest of all joys—sated greed. All of a sudden the sick man's voice rang through the room; the tones vibrated like the strokes of a bell:

"Who is there?" called Pons.

"Monsieur! just go back to bed!" exclaimed La Cibot, springing upon Pons and dragging him by main force. "What next! Have you a mind to kill yourself?—Very well, then, it is not Dr. Poulain, it is Remonencq, good soul, so anxious that he has come to ask after you!—Everybody is so fond of you that the whole house is in a flutter. So what is there to fear?"

"It seems to me that there are several of you," said Pons.

"Several? that is good! What next! Are you dreaming!—You will go off your head before you have done, upon my word!—Here, look!"—and La Cibot flung open the door, signed to Magus to go, and beckoned to Remonencq.

"Well, my dear sir," said the Auvergnat, now supplied with something to say, "I just came to ask after you, for the whole house is alarmed about you.—Nobody likes Death to set foot in a house!—And lastly, Daddy Monistrol, whom you know very well, told me to tell you that if you wanted money he was at your service——"

"He sent you here to take a look round at my knick-knacks!" returned the old collector from his bed; and the sour tones of his voice were full of suspicion.

A sufferer from liver complaint nearly always takes momentary and special dislikes to some person or thing, and concentrates all his ill-humor upon the object. Pons imagined that some one had designs upon his precious collection; the thought of guarding it became a fixed idea with him; Schmucke was continually sent to see if any one had stolen into the sanctuary.

"Your collection is fine enough to attract the attention of chineurs," Remonencq answered astutely. "I am not much in the art line myself; but you are supposed to be such a great connoisseur, sir, that with my eyes shut—supposing, for instance, that you should need money some time or other, for nothing costs so much as these confounded illnesses; there was my sister now, when she would have got better again just as well without. Doctors are rascals that take advantage of your condition to—"

"Thank you, good-day, good-day," broke in Pons, eying the marine store-dealer uneasily.

"I will go to the door with him, for fear he should touch something," La Cibot whispered to her patient.

"Yes, yes," answered the invalid, thanking her by a glance.

La Cibot shut the bedroom door behind her, and Pons' suspicions awoke again at once.

She found Magus standing motionless before the four pictures. His immobility, his admiration, can only be understood by other souls open to ideal beauty, to the ineffable joy of beholding art made perfect; such as these can stand for whole hours before the Antiope—Correggio's masterpiece—before Leonardo's Gioconda, Titian's Mistress, Andrea del Sarto's Holy Family, Domenichino's Children Among the Flowers, Raphael's little cameo, or his Portrait of an Old Man—Art's greatest masterpieces.

"Be quick and go, and make no noise," said La Cibot.

The Jew walked slowly backwards, giving the pictures such a farewell gaze as a lover gives his love. Outside on the landing, La Cibot tapped his bony arm. His rapt contemplations had put an idea into her head.

"Make it four thousand francs for each picture," said she, "or I do nothing."

"I am so poor!..." began Magus. "I want the pictures simply for their own sake, simply and solely for the love of art, my dear lady."

"I can understand that love, sonny, you are so dried up. But if you do not promise me sixteen thousand francs now, before Remonencq here, I shall want twenty to-morrow."

"Sixteen; I promise," returned the Jew, frightened by the woman's rapacity.

La Cibot turned to Remonencq.

"What oath can a Jew swear?" she inquired.

"You may trust him," replied the marine store-dealer. "He is as honest as I am."

"Very well; and you?" asked she, "if I get him to sell them to you, what will you give me?"

"Half-share of profits," Remonencq answered briskly.

"I would rather have a lump sum," returned La Cibot; "I am not in business myself."

"You understand business uncommonly well!" put in Elie Magus, smiling; "a famous saleswoman you would make!"

"I want her to take me into partnership, me and my goods," said the Auvergnat, as he took La Cibot's plump arm and gave it playful taps like hammer-strokes. "I don't ask her to bring anything into the firm but her good looks! You are making a mistake when your stick to your Turk of a Cibot and his needle. Is a little bit of a porter the man to make a woman rich—a fine woman like you? Ah, what a figure you would make in a shop on the boulevard, all among the curiosities, gossiping with amateurs and twisting them round your fingers! Just you leave your lodge as soon as you have lined your purse here, and you shall see what will become of us both."

"Lined my purse!" cried Cibot. "I am incapable of taking the worth of a single pin; you mind that, Remonencq! I am known in the neighborhood for an honest woman, I am."

La Cibot's eyes flashed fire.

"There, never mind," said Elie Magus; "this Auvergnat seems to be too fond of you to mean to insult you."

"How she would draw on the customers!" cried the Auvergnat.

Mme. Cibot softened at this.

"Be fair, sonnies," quoth she, "and judge for yourselves how I am placed. These ten years past I have been wearing my life out for these two old bachelors yonder, and neither or them has given me anything but words. Remonencq will tell you that I feed them by contract, and lose twenty or thirty sous a day; all my savings have gone that way, by the soul of my mother (the only author of my days that I ever knew), this is as true as that I live, and that this is the light of day, and may my coffee poison me if I lie about a farthing. Well, there is one up there that will die soon, eh? and he the richer of the two that I have treated like my own children. Would you believe it, my dear sir, I have told him over and over again for days past that he is at death's door (for Dr. Poulain has given him up), he could not say less about putting my name down in his will. We shall only get our due by taking it, upon my word, as an honest woman, for as for trusting to the next-of-kin!—No fear! There! look you here, words don't stink; it is a bad world!"

"That is true," Elie Magus answered cunningly, "that is true; and it is just the like of us that are among the best," he added, looking at Remonencq.

"Just let me be," returned La Cibot; "I am not speaking of you. 'Pressing company is always accepted,' as the old actor said. I swear to you that the two gentlemen already owe me nearly three thousand francs; the little I have is gone by now in medicine and things on their account; and now suppose they refuse to recognize my advances? I am so stupidly honest that I did not dare to say nothing to them about it. Now, you that are in business, my dear sir, do you advise me to got to a lawyer?"

"A lawyer?" cried Remonencq; "you know more about it than all the lawyers put together—"

Just at that moment a sound echoed in the great staircase, a sound as if some heavy body had fallen in the dining-room.

"Oh, goodness me!" exclaimed La Cibot; "it seems to me that monsieur has just taken a ticket for the ground floor."

She pushed her fellow-conspirators out at the door, and while the pair descended the stairs with remarkable agility, she ran to the dining-room, and there beheld Pons, in his shirt, stretched out upon the tiles. He had fainted. She lifted him as if he had been a feather, carried him back to his room, laid him in bed, burned feathers under his nose, bathed his temples with eau-de-cologne, and at last brought him to consciousness. When she saw his eyes unclose and life return, she stood over him, hands on hips.

"No slippers! In your shirt! That is the way to kill yourself! Why do you suspect me?—If this is to be the way of it, I wish you good-day, sir. Here have I served you these ten years, I have spent money on you till my savings are all gone, to spare trouble to that poor M. Schmucke, crying like a child on the stairs—and this is my reward! You have been spying on me. God has punished you! It serves you right! Here I am straining myself to carry you, running the risk of doing myself a mischief that I shall feel all my days. Oh dear, oh dear! and the door left open too—"

"You were talking with some one. Who was it?"

"Here are notions!" cried La Cibot. "What next! Am I your bond-slave? Am I to give account of myself to you? Do you know that if you bother me like this, I shall clear out! You shall take a nurse."

Frightened by this threat, Pons unwittingly allowed La Cibot to see the extent of the power of her sword of Damocles.

"It is my illness!" he pleaded piteously.

"It is as you please," La Cibot answered roughly.

She went. Pons, confused, remorseful, admiring his nurse's scalding devotion, reproached himself for his behavior. The fall on the paved floor of the dining-room had shaken and bruised him, and aggravated his illness, but Pons was scarcely conscious of his physical sufferings.

La Cibot met Schmucke on the staircase.

"Come here, sir," she said. "There is bad news, that there is! M. Pons is going off his head! Just think of it! he got up with nothing on, he came after me—and down he came full-length. Ask him why—he knows nothing about it. He is in a bad way. I did nothing to provoke such violence, unless, perhaps, I waked up ideas by talking to him of his early amours. Who knows men? Old libertines that they are. I ought not to have shown him my arms when his eyes were glittering like carbuckles."

Schmucke listened. Mme. Cibot might have been talking Hebrew for anything that he understood.

"I have given myself a wrench that I shall feel all my days," added she, making as though she were in great pain. (Her arms did, as a matter of fact, ache a little, and the muscular fatigue suggested an idea, which she proceeded to turn to profit.) "So stupid I am. When I saw him lying there on the floor, I just took him up in my arms as if he had been a child, and carried him back to bed, I did. And I strained myself, I can feel it now. Ah! how it hurts!—I am going downstairs. Look after our patient. I will send Cibot for Dr. Poulain. I had rather die outright than be crippled."

La Cibot crawled downstairs, clinging to the banisters, and writhing and groaning so piteously that the tenants, in alarm, came out upon their landings. Schmucke supported the suffering creature, and told the story of La Cibot's devotion, the tears running down his cheeks as he spoke. Before very long the whole house, the whole neighborhood indeed, had heard of Mme. Cibot's heroism; she had given herself a dangerous strain, it was said, with lifting one of the "nutcrackers."

Schmucke meanwhile went to Pons' bedside with the tale. Their factotum was in a frightful state. "What shall we do without her?" they said, as they looked at each other; but Pons was so plainly the worse for his escapade, that Schmucke did not dare to scold him.

"Gonfounded pric-a-prac! I would sooner purn dem dan loose mein friend!" he cried, when Pons told him of the cause of the accident. "To suspect Montame Zipod, dot lend us her safings! It is not goot; but it is der illness—"

"Ah! what an illness! I am not the same man, I can feel it," said Pons. "My dear Schmucke, if only you did not suffer through me!"

"Scold me," Schmucke answered, "und leaf Montame Zipod in beace."

As for Mme. Cibot, she soon recovered in Dr. Poulain's hands; and her restoration, bordering on the miraculous, shed additional lustre on her name and fame in the Marais. Pons attributed the success to the excellent constitution of the patient, who resumed her ministrations seven days later to the great satisfaction of her two gentlemen. Her influence in their household and her tyranny was increased a hundred-fold by the accident. In the course of a week, the two nutcrackers ran into debt; Mme. Cibot paid the outstanding amounts, and took the opportunity to obtain from Schmucke (how easily!) a receipt for two thousand francs, which she had lent, she said, to the friends.

"Oh, what a doctor M. Poulain is!" cried La Cibot, for Pons' benefit. "He will bring you through, my dear sir, for he pulled me out of my coffin! Cibot, poor man, thought I was dead.... Well, Dr. Poulain will have told you that while I was in bed I thought of nothing but you. 'God above,' said I, 'take me, and let my dear Mr. Pons live—'"

"Poor dear Mme. Cibot, you all but crippled yourself for me."

"Ah! but for Dr. Poulain I should have been put to bed with a shovel by now, as we shall all be one day. Well, what must be, must, as the old actor said. One must take things philosophically. How did you get on without me?"

"Schmucke nursed me," said the invalid; "but our poor money-box and our lessons have suffered. I do not know how he managed."

"Calm yourself, Bons," exclaimed Schmucke; "ve haf in Zipod ein panker—"

"Do not speak of it, my lamb. You are our children, both of you," cried La Cibot. "Our savings will be well invested; you are safer than the Bank. So long as we have a morsel of bread, half of it is yours. It is not worth mentioning—"

"Boor Montame Zipod!" said Schmucke, and he went.

Pons said nothing.

"Would you believe it, my cherub?" said La Cibot, as the sick man tossed uneasily, "in my agony—for it was a near squeak for me—the thing that worried me most was the thought that I must leave you alone, with no one to look after you, and my poor Cibot without a farthing.... My savings are such a trifle, that I only mention them in connection with my death and Cibot, an angel that he is! No. He nursed me as if I had been a queen, he did, and cried like a calf over me!... But I counted on you, upon my word. I said to him, 'There, Cibot! my gentlemen will not let you starve—'"

Pons made no reply to this thrust ad testamentum; but as the portress waited for him to say something—"I shall recommend you to M. Schmucke," he said at last.

"Ah!" cried La Cibot, "whatever you do will be right; I trust in you and your heart. Let us never talk of this again; you make me feel ashamed, my cherub. Think of getting better, you will outlive us all yet."

Profound uneasiness filled Mme. Cibot's mind. She cast about for some way of making the sick man understand that she expected a legacy. That evening, when Schmucke was eating his dinner as usual by Pons' bedside, she went out, hoping to find Dr. Poulain at home.

Dr. Poulain lived in the Rue d'Orleans in a small ground floor establishment, consisting of a lobby, a sitting-room, and two bedrooms. A closet, opening into the lobby and the bedroom, had been turned into a study for the doctor. The kitchen, the servant's bedroom, and a small cellar were situated in a wing of the house, a huge pile built in the time of the Empire, on the site of an old mansion of which the garden still remained, though it had been divided among the three ground floor tenants.

Nothing had been changed in the doctor's house since it was built. Paint and paper and ceilings were all redolent of the Empire. The grimy deposits of forty years lay thick on walls and ceilings, on paper and paint and mirrors and gilding. And yet, this little establishment, in the depths of the Marais, paid a rent of a thousand francs.

Mme. Poulain, the doctor's mother, aged sixty-seven, was ending her days in the second bedroom. She worked for a breeches-maker, stitching men's leggings, breeches, belts, and braces, anything, in fact, that is made in a way of business which has somewhat fallen off of late years. Her whole time was spent in keeping her son's house and superintending the one servant; she never went abroad, and took the air in the little garden entered through the glass door of the sitting-room. Twenty years previously, when her husband died, she sold his business to his best workman, who gave his master's widow work enough to earn a daily wage of thirty sous. She had made every sacrifice to educate her son. At all costs, he should occupy a higher station than his father before him; and now she was proud of her Aesculapius, she believed in him, and sacrificed everything to him as before. She was happy to take care of him, to work and put by a little money, and dream of nothing but his welfare, and love him with an intelligent love of which every mother is not capable. For instance, Mme. Poulain remembered that she had been a working girl. She would not injure her son's prospects; he should not be ashamed by his mother (for the good woman's grammar was something of the same kind as Mme. Cibot's); and for this reason she kept in the background, and went to her room of her own accord if any distinguished patient came to consult the doctor, or if some old schoolfellow or fellow-student chanced to call. Dr. Poulain had never had occasion to blush for the mother whom he revered; and this sublime love of hers more than atoned for a defective education.

The breeches-maker's business sold for about twenty thousand francs, and the widow invested the money in the Funds in 1820. The income of eleven hundred francs per annum derived from this source was, at one time, her whole fortune. For many a year the neighbors used to see the doctor's linen hanging out to dry upon a clothes-line in the garden, and the servant and Mme. Poulain thriftily washed everything at home; a piece of domestic economy which did not a little to injure the doctor's practice, for it was thought that if he was so poor, it must be through his own fault. Her eleven hundred francs scarcely did more than pay the rent. During those early days, Mme. Poulain, good, stout, little old woman, was the breadwinner, and the poor household lived upon her earnings. After twelve years of perseverance upon a rough and stony road, Dr. Poulain at last was making an income of three thousand francs, and Mme. Poulain had an income of about five thousand francs at her disposal. Five thousand francs for those who know Paris means a bare subsistence.

The sitting-room, where patients waited for an interview, was shabbily furnished. There was the inevitable mahogany sofa covered with yellow-flowered Utrecht velvet, four easy-chairs, a tea-table, a console, and half-a-dozen chairs, all the property of the deceased breeches-maker, and chosen by him. A lyre-shaped clock between two Egyptian candlesticks still preserved its glass shade intact. You asked yourself how the yellow chintz window-curtains, covered with red flowers, had contrived to hang together for so long; for evidently they had come from the Jouy factory, and Oberkampf received the Emperor's congratulations upon similar hideous productions of the cotton industry in 1809.

The doctor's consulting-room was fitted up in the same style, with household stuff from the paternal chamber. It looked stiff, poverty-stricken, and bare. What patient could put faith in the skill of any unknown doctor who could not even furnish his house? And this in a time when advertising is all-powerful; when we gild the gas-lamps in the Place de la Concorde to console the poor man for his poverty by reminding him that he is rich as a citizen.

The ante-chamber did duty as a dining-room. The servant sat at her sewing there whenever she was not busy in the kitchen or keeping the doctor's mother company. From the dingy short curtains in the windows you would have guessed at the shabby thrift behind them without setting foot in the dreary place. What could those wall-cupboards contain but stale scraps of food, chipped earthenware, corks used over and over again indefinitely, soiled table-linen, odds and ends that could descend but one step lower into the dust-heap, and all the squalid necessities of a pinched household in Paris?

In these days, when the five-franc piece is always lurking in our thoughts and intruding itself into our speech, Dr. Poulain, aged thirty-three, was still a bachelor. Heaven had bestowed on him a mother with no connections. In ten years he had not met with the faintest pretext for a romance in his professional career; his practice lay among clerks and small manufacturers, people in his own sphere of life, with homes very much like his own. His richer patients were butchers, bakers, and the more substantial tradespeople of the neighborhood. These, for the most part, attributed their recovery to Nature, as an excuse for paying for the services of a medical man, who came on foot, at the rate of two francs per visit. In his profession, a carriage is more necessary than medical skill.

A humdrum monotonous life tells in the end upon the most adventurous spirit. A man fashions himself to his lot, he accepts a commonplace existence; and Dr. Poulain, after ten years of his practice, continued his labors of Sisyphus without the despair that made early days so bitter. And yet—like every soul in Paris—he cherished a dream. Remonencq was happy in his dream; La Cibot had a dream of her own; and Dr. Poulain, too, dreamed. Some day he would be called in to attend a rich and influential patient, would effect a positive cure, and the patient would procure a post for him; he would be head surgeon to a hospital, medical officer of a prison or police-court, or doctor to the boulevard theatres. He had come by his present appointment as doctor to the Mairie in this very way. La Cibot had called him in when the landlord of the house in the Rue de Normandie fell ill; he had treated the case with complete success; M. Pillerault, the patient, took an interest in the young doctor, called to thank him, and saw his carefully-hidden poverty. Count Popinot, the cabinet minister, had married M. Pillerault's grand-niece, and greatly respected her uncle; of him, therefore, M. Pillerault had asked for the post, which Poulain had now held for two years. That appointment and its meagre salary came just in time to prevent a desperate step; Poulain was thinking of emigration; and for a Frenchman, it is a kind of death to leave France.

Dr. Poulain went, you may be sure, to thank Count Popinot; but as Count Popinot's family physician was the celebrated Horace Bianchon, it was pretty clear that his chances of gaining a footing in that house were something of the slenderest. The poor doctor had fondly hoped for the patronage of a powerful cabinet minister, one of the twelve or fifteen cards which a cunning hand has been shuffling for sixteen years on the green baize of the council table, and now he dropped back again into his Marais, his old groping life among the poor and the small tradespeople, with the privilege of issuing certificates of death for a yearly stipend of twelve hundred francs.

Dr. Poulain had distinguished himself to some extent as a house-student; he was a prudent practitioner, and not without experience. His deaths caused no scandal; he had plenty of opportunities of studying all kinds of complaints in anima vili. Judge, therefore, of the spleen that he nourished! The expression of his countenance, lengthy and not too cheerful to begin with, at times was positively appalling. Set a Tartuffe's all-devouring eyes, and the sour humor of an Alceste in a sallow-parchment visage, and try to imagine for yourself the gait, bearing, and expression of a man who thought himself as good a doctor as the illustrious Bianchon, and felt that he was held down in his narrow lot by an iron hand. He could not help comparing his receipts (ten francs a day if he was fortunate) with Bianchon's five or six hundred.

Are the hatreds and jealousies of democracy incomprehensible after this? Ambitious and continually thwarted, he could not reproach himself. He had once already tried his fortune by inventing a purgative pill, something like Morrison's, and intrusted the business operations to an old hospital chum, a house-student who afterwards took a retail drug business; but, unluckily, the druggist, smitten with the charms of a ballet-dancer of the Ambigu-Comique, found himself at length in the bankruptcy court; and as the patent had been taken out in his name, his partner was literally without a remedy, and the important discovery enriched the purchaser of the business. The sometime house-student set sail for Mexico, that land of gold, taking poor Poulain's little savings with him; and, to add insult to injury, the opera-dancer treated him as an extortioner when he applied to her for his money.

Not a single rich patient had come to him since he had the luck to cure old M. Pillerault. Poulain made his rounds on foot, scouring the Marais like a lean cat, and obtained from two to forty sous out of a score of visits. The paying patient was a phenomenon about as rare as that anomalous fowl known as a "white blackbird" in all sublunary regions.

The briefless barrister, the doctor without a patient, are pre-eminently the two types of a decorous despair peculiar to this city of Paris; it is mute, dull despair in human form, dressed in a black coat and trousers with shining seams that recall the zinc on an attic roof, a glistening satin waistcoat, a hat preserved like a relic, a pair of old gloves, and a cotton shirt. The man is the incarnation of a melancholy poem, sombre as the secrets of the Conciergerie. Other kinds of poverty, the poverty of the artist—actor, painter, musician, or poet—are relieved and lightened by the artist's joviality, the reckless gaiety of the Bohemian border country—the first stage of the journey to the Thebaid of genius. But these two black-coated professions that go afoot through the street are brought continually in contact with disease and dishonor; they see nothing of human nature but its sores; in the forlorn first stages and beginnings of their career they eye competitors suspiciously and defiantly; concentrated dislike and ambition flashes out in glances like the breaking forth of hidden flames. Let two schoolfellows meet after twenty years, the rich man will avoid the poor; he does not recognize him, he is afraid even to glance into the gulf which Fate has set between him and the friend of other years. The one has been borne through life on the mettlesome steed called Fortune, or wafted on the golden clouds of success; the other has been making his way in underground Paris through the sewers, and bears the marks of his career upon him. How many a chum of old days turned aside at the sight of the doctor's greatcoat and waistcoat!

With this explanation, it should be easy to understand how Dr. Poulain came to lend himself so readily to the farce of La Cibot's illness and recovery. Greed of every kind, ambition of every nature, is not easy to hide. The doctor examined his patient, found that every organ was sound and healthy, admired the regularity of her pulse and the perfect ease of her movements; and as she continued to moan aloud, he saw that for some reason she found it convenient to lie at Death's door. The speedy cure of a serious imaginary disease was sure to cause a sensation in the neighborhood; the doctor would be talked about. He made up his mind at once. He talked of rupture, and of taking it in time, and thought even worse of the case than La Cibot herself. The portress was plied with various remedies, and finally underwent a sham operation, crowned with complete success. Poulain repaired to the Arsenal Library, looked out a grotesque case in some of Desplein's records of extraordinary cures, and fitted the details to Mme. Cibot, modestly attributing the success of the treatment to the great surgeon, in whose steps (he said) he walked. Such is the impudence of beginners in Paris. Everything is made to serve as a ladder by which to climb upon the scene; and as everything, even the rungs of a ladder, will wear out in time, the new members of every profession are at a loss to find the right sort of wood of which to make steps for themselves.

There are moments when the Parisian is not propitious. He grows tired of raising pedestals, pouts like a spoiled child, and will have no more idols; or, to state it more accurately, Paris cannot always find a proper object for infatuation. Now and then the vein of genius gives out, and at such times the Parisian may turn supercilious; he is not always willing to bow down and gild mediocrity.



Mme. Cibot, entering in her usual unceremonious fashion, found the doctor and his mother at table, before a bowl of lamb's lettuce, the cheapest of all salad-stuffs. The dessert consisted of a thin wedge of Brie cheese flanked by a plate of specked foreign apples and a dish of mixed dry fruits, known as quatre-mendiants, in which the raisin stalks were abundantly conspicuous.

"You can stay, mother," said the doctor, laying a hand on Mme. Poulain's arm; "this is Mme. Cibot, of whom I have told you."

"My respects to you, madame, and my duty to you, sir," said La Cibot, taking the chair which the doctor offered. "Ah! is this your mother, sir? She is very happy to have a son who has such talent; he saved my life, madame, brought me back from the depths."

The widow, hearing Mme. Cibot praise her son in this way, thought her a delightful woman.

"I have just come to tell you, that, between ourselves, poor M. Pons is doing very badly, sir, and I have something to say to you about him—"

"Let us go into the sitting-room," interrupted the doctor, and with a significant gesture he indicated the servant.

In the sitting-room La Cibot explained her position with regard to the pair of nutcrackers at very considerable length. She repeated the history of her loan with added embellishments, and gave a full account of the immense services rendered during the past ten years to MM. Pons and Schmucke. The two old men, to all appearance, could not exist without her motherly care. She posed as an angel; she told so many lies, one after another, watering them with her tears, that old Mme. Poulain was quite touched.

"You understand, my dear sir," she concluded, "that I really ought to know how far I can depend on M. Pons' intentions, supposing that he should not die; not that I want him to die, for looking after those two innocents is my life, madame, you see; still, when one of them is gone I shall look after the other. For my own part, I was built by Nature to rival mothers. Without nobody to care for, nobody to take for a child, I don't know what I should do.... So if M. Poulain only would, he might do me a service for which I should be very grateful; and that is, to say a word to M. Pons for me. Goodness me! an annuity of a thousand francs, is that too much, I ask you?... To. M. Schmucke it would be so much gained.—Our dear patient said that he should recommend me to the German, poor man; it is his idea, no doubt, that M. Schmucke should be his heir. But what is a man that cannot put two ideas together in French? And besides, he would be quite capable of going back to Germany, he will be in such despair over his friend's death—"

The doctor grew grave. "My dear Mme. Cibot," he said, "this sort of thing does not in the least concern a doctor. I should not be allowed to exercise my profession if it was known that I interfered in the matter of my patients' testamentary dispositions. The law forbids a doctor to receive a legacy from a patient—"

"A stupid law! What is to hinder me from dividing my legacy with you?" La Cibot said immediately.

"I will go further," said the doctor; "my professional conscience will not permit me to speak to M. Pons of his death. In the first place, he is not so dangerously ill that there is any need to speak of it, and in the second, such talk coming from me might give a shock to the system that would do him real harm, and then his illness might terminate fatally—"

"I don't put on gloves to tell him to get his affairs in order," cried Mme. Cibot, "and he is none the worse for that. He is used to it. There is nothing to fear."

"Not a word more about it, my dear Mme. Cibot! These things are not within a doctor's province; it is a notary's business—"

"But, my dear M. Poulain, suppose that M. Pons of his own accord should ask you how he is, and whether he had better make his arrangements; then, would you refuse to tell him that if you want to get better it is an excellent plan to set everything in order? Then you might just slip in a little word for me—"

"Oh, if he talks of making his will, I certainly shall not dissuade him," said the doctor.

"Very well, that is settled. I came to thank you for your care of me," she added, as she slipped a folded paper containing three gold coins into the doctor's hands. "It is all I can do at the moment. Ah! my dear M. Poulain, if I were rich, you should be rich, you that are the image of Providence on earth.—Madame, you have an angel for a son."

La Cibot rose to her feet, Mme. Poulain bowed amiably, and the doctor went to the door with the visitor. Just then a sudden, lurid gleam of light flashed across the mind of this Lady Macbeth of the streets. She saw clearly that the doctor was her accomplice—he had taken the fee for the sham illness.

"M. Poulain," she began, "how can you refuse to say a word or two to save me from want, when you helped me in the affair of my accident?"

The doctor felt that the devil had him by the hair, as the saying is; he felt, too, that the hair was being twisted round the pitiless red claw. Startled and afraid lest he should sell his honesty for such a trifle, he answered the diabolical suggestion by another no less diabolical.

"Listen, my dear Mme. Cibot," he said, as he drew her into his consulting-room. "I will now pay a debt of gratitude that I owe you for my appointment to the mairie—"

"We go shares?" she asked briskly.

"In what?"

"In the legacy."

"You do not know me," said Dr. Poulain, drawing himself up like Valerius Publicola. "Let us have no more of that. I have a friend, an old schoolfellow of mine, a very intelligent young fellow; and we are so much the more intimate, because, our lives have fallen out very much in the same way. He was studying law while I was a house-student, he was engrossing deeds in Maitre Couture's office. His father was a shoemaker, and mine was a breeches-maker; he has not found anyone to take much interest in his career, nor has he any capital; for, after all, capital is only to be had from sympathizers. He could only afford to buy a provincial connection—at Mantes—and so little do provincials understand the Parisian intellect, that they set all sorts of intrigues on foot against him."

"The wretches!" cried La Cibot.

"Yes," said the doctor. "They combined against him to such purpose, that they forced him to sell his connection by misrepresenting something that he had done; the attorney for the crown interfered, he belonged to the place, and sided with his fellow-townsmen. My friend's name is Fraisier. He is lodged as I am, and he is even leaner and more threadbare. He took refuge in our arrondissement, and is reduced to appear for clients in the police-court or before the magistrate. He lives in the Rue de la Perle close by. Go to No. 9, third floor, and you will see his name on the door on the landing, painted in gilt letters on a small square of red leather. Fraisier makes a special point of disputes among the porters, workmen, and poor folk in the arrondissement, and his charges are low. He is an honest man; for I need not tell you that if he had been a scamp, he would be keeping his carriage by now. I will call and see my friend Fraisier this evening. Go to him early to-morrow; he knows M. Louchard, the bailiff; M. Tabareau, the clerk of the court; and the justice of the peace, M. Vitel; and M. Trognon, the notary. He is even now looked upon as one of the best men of business in the Quarter. If he takes charge of your interests, if you can secure him as M. Pons' adviser, you will have a second self in him, you see. But do not make dishonorable proposals to him, as you did just now to me; he has a head on his shoulders, you will understand each other. And as for acknowledging his services, I will be your intermediary—"

Mme. Cibot looked askance at the doctor.

"Is that the lawyer who helped Mme. Florimond the haberdasher in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple out of a fix in that matter of her friend's legacy?"

"The very same."

"Wasn't it a shame that she did not marry him after he had gained two thousand francs a year for her?" exclaimed La Cibot. "And she thought to clear off scores by making him a present of a dozen shirts and a couple of dozen pocket-handkerchiefs; an outfit, in short."

"My dear Mme. Cibot, that outfit cost a thousand francs, and Fraisier was just setting up for himself in the Quarter, and wanted the things very badly. And what was more, she paid the bill without asking any questions. That affair brought him clients, and now he is very busy; but in my line a practice brings—"

"It is only the righteous that suffer here below," said La Cibot. "Well, M. Poulain, good-day and thank you."

And herewith begins the tragedy, or, if you like to have it so, a terrible comedy—the death of an old bachelor delivered over by circumstances too strong for him to the rapacity and greed that gathered about his bed. And other forces came to the support of rapacity and greed; there was the picture collector's mania, that most intense of all passions; there was the cupidity of the Sieur Fraisier, whom you shall presently behold in his den, a sight to make you shudder; and lastly, there was the Auvergnat thirsting for money, ready for anything—even for a crime—that should bring him the capital he wanted. The first part of the story serves in some sort as a prelude to this comedy in which all the actors who have hitherto occupied the stage will reappear.

The degradation of a word is one of those curious freaks of manners upon which whole volumes of explanation might be written. Write to an attorney and address him as "Lawyer So-and-so," and you insult him as surely as you would insult a wholesale colonial produce merchant by addressing your letter to "Mr. So-and-so, Grocer." There are plenty of men of the world who ought to be aware, since the knowledge of such subtle distinctions is their province, that you cannot insult a French writer more cruelly than by calling him un homme de lettres—a literary man. The word monsieur is a capital example of the life and death of words. Abbreviated from monseigneur, once so considerable a title, and even now, in the form of sire, reserved for emperors and kings, it is bestowed indifferently upon all and sundry; while the twin-word messire, which is nothing but its double and equivalent, if by any chance it slips into a certificate of burial, produces an outcry in the Republican papers.

Magistrates, councillors, jurisconsults, judges, barristers, officers for the crown, bailiffs, attorneys, clerks of the court, procurators, solicitors, and agents of various kinds, represent or misrepresent Justice. The "lawyer" and the bailiff's men (commonly called "the brokers") are the two lowest rungs of the ladder. Now, the bailiff's man is an outsider, an adventitious minister of justice, appearing to see that judgment is executed; he is, in fact, a kind of inferior executioner employed by the county court. But the word "lawyer" (homme de loi) is a depreciatory term applied to the legal profession. Consuming professional jealousy finds similar disparaging epithets for fellow-travelers in every walk of life, and every calling has its special insult. The scorn flung into the words homme de loi, homme de lettres, is wanting in the plural form, which may be used without offence; but in Paris every profession, learned or unlearned, has its omega, the individual who brings it down to the level of the lowest class; and the written law has its connecting link with the custom right of the streets. There are districts where the pettifogging man of business, known as Lawyer So-and-So, is still to be found. M. Fraisier was to the member of the Incorporated Law Society as the money-lender of the Halles, offering small loans for a short period at an exorbitant interest, is to the great capitalist.

Working people, strange to say are as shy of officials as of fashionable restaurants, they take advice from irregular sources as they turn into a little wineshop to drink. Each rank in life finds its own level, and there abides. None but a chosen few care to climb the heights, few can feel at ease in the presence of their betters, or take their place among them, like a Beaumarchais letting fall the watch of the great lord who tried to humiliate him. And if there are few who can even rise to a higher social level, those among them who can throw off their swaddling-clothes are rare and great exceptions.



At six o'clock the next morning Mme. Cibot stood in the Rue de la Perle; she was making a survey of the abode of her future adviser, Lawyer Fraisier. The house was one of the old-fashioned kind formerly inhabited by small tradespeople and citizens with small means. A cabinetmaker's shop occupied almost the whole of the ground floor, as well as the little yard behind, which was covered with his workshops and warehouses; the small remaining space being taken up by the porter's lodge and the passage entry in the middle. The staircase walls were half rotten with damp and covered with saltpetre to such a degree that the house seemed to be stricken with leprosy.

Mme. Cibot went straight to the porter's lodge, and there encountered one of the fraternity, a shoemaker, his wife, and two small children, all housed in a room ten feet square, lighted from the yard at the back. La Cibot mentioned her profession, named herself, and spoke of her house in the Rue de Normandie, and the two women were on cordial terms at once. After a quarter of an hour spent in gossip while the shoemaker's wife made breakfast ready for her husband and the children, Mme. Cibot turned the conversation to the subject of the lodgers, and spoke of the lawyer.

"I have come to see him on business," she said. "One of his friends, Dr. Poulain, recommended me to him. Do you know Dr. Poulain?"

"I should think I do," said the lady of the Rue de la Perle. "He saved my little girl's life when she had the croup."

"He saved my life, too, madame. What sort of a man is this M. Fraisier?"

"He is the sort of man, my dear lady, out of whom it is very difficult to get the postage-money at the end of the month."

To a person of La Cibot's intelligence this was enough.

"One may be poor and honest," observed she.

"I am sure I hope so," returned Fraisier's portress. "We are not rolling in coppers, let alone gold or silver; but we have not a farthing belonging to anybody else."

This sort of talk sounded familiar to La Cibot.

"In short, one can trust him, child, eh?"

"Lord! when M. Fraisier means well by any one, there is not his like, so I have heard Mme. Florimond say."

"And why didn't she marry him when she owed her fortune to him?" La Cibot asked quickly. "It is something for a little haberdasher, kept by an old man, to be a barrister's wife—"

"Why?—" asked the portress, bringing Mme. Cibot out into the passage. "Why?—You are going to see him, are you not, madame?—Very well, when you are in his office you will know why."

From the state of the staircase, lighted by sash-windows on the side of the yard, it was pretty evident that the inmates of the house, with the exception of the landlord and M. Fraisier himself, were all workmen. There were traces of various crafts in the deposit of mud upon the steps—brass-filings, broken buttons, scraps of gauze, and esparto grass lay scattered about. The walls of the upper stories were covered with apprentices' ribald scrawls and caricatures. The portress' last remark had roused La Cibot's curiosity; she decided, not unnaturally, that she would consult Dr. Poulain's friend; but as for employing him, that must depend upon her impressions.

"I sometimes wonder how Mme. Sauvage can stop in his service," said the portress, by way of comment; she was following in Mme. Cibot's wake. "I will come up with you, madame" she added; "I am taking the milk and the newspaper up to my landlord."

Arrived on the second floor above the entresol, La Cibot beheld a door of the most villainous description. The doubtful red paint was coated for seven or eight inches round the keyhole with a filthy glaze, a grimy deposit from which the modern house-decorator endeavors to protect the doors of more elegant apartments by glass "finger-plates." A grating, almost stopped up with some compound similar to the deposit with which a restaurant-keeper gives an air of cellar-bound antiquity to a merely middle-aged bottle, only served to heighten the general resemblance to a prison door; a resemblance further heightened by the trefoil-shaped iron-work, the formidable hinges, the clumsy nail-heads. A miser, or a pamphleteer at strife with the world at large, must surely have invented these fortifications. A leaden sink, which received the waste water of the household, contributed its quota to the fetid atmosphere of the staircase, and the ceiling was covered with fantastic arabesques traced by candle-smoke—such arabesques! On pulling a greasy acorn tassel attached to the bell-rope, a little bell jangled feebly somewhere within, complaining of the fissure in its metal sides.

Every detail was in keeping with the general dismal effect. La Cibot heard a heavy footstep, and the asthmatic wheezing of a virago within, and Mme. Sauvage presently showed herself. Adrien Brauwer might have painted just such a hag for his picture of Witches starting for the Sabbath; a stout, unwholesome slattern, five feet six inches in height, with a grenadier countenance and a beard which far surpassed La Cibot's own; she wore a cheap, hideously ugly cotton gown, a bandana handkerchief knotted over hair which she still continued to put in curl papers (using for that purpose the printed circulars which her master received), and a huge pair of gold earrings like cart-wheels in her ears. This female Cerberus carried a battered skillet in one hand, and opening the door, set free an imprisoned odor of scorched milk—a nauseous and penetrating smell, that lost itself at once, however, among the fumes outside.

"What can I do for you, missus?" demanded Mme. Sauvage, and with a truculent air she looked La Cibot over; evidently she was of the opinion that the visitor was too well dressed, and her eyes looked the more murderous because they were naturally bloodshot.

"I have come to see M. Fraisier; his friend, Dr. Poulain, sent me."

"Oh! come in, missus," said La Sauvage, grown very amiable of a sudden, which proves that she was prepared for this morning visit.

With a sweeping courtesy, the stalwart woman flung open the door of a private office, which looked upon the street, and discovered the ex-attorney of Mantes.

The room was a complete picture of a third-rate solicitor's office; with the stained wooden cases, the letter-files so old that they had grown beards (in ecclesiastical language), the red tape dangling limp and dejected, the pasteboard boxes covered with traces of the gambols of mice, the dirty floor, the ceiling tawny with smoke. A frugal allowance of wood was smouldering on a couple of fire-dogs on the hearth. And on the chimney-piece above stood a foggy mirror and a modern clock with an inlaid wooden case; Fraisier had picked it up at an execution sale, together with the tawdry imitation rococo candlesticks, with the zinc beneath showing through the lacquer in several places.

M. Fraisier was small, thin, and unwholesome looking; his red face, covered with an eruption, told of tainted blood; and he had, moreover, a trick of continually scratching his right arm. A wig pushed to the back of his head displayed a brick-colored cranium of ominous conformation. This person rose from a cane-seated armchair, in which he sat on a green leather cushion, assumed an agreeable expression, and brought forward a chair.

"Mme. Cibot, I believe?" queried he, in dulcet tones.

"Yes, sir," answered the portress. She had lost her habitual assurance.

Something in the tones of a voice which strongly resembled the sounds of the little door-bell, something in a glance even sharper than the sharp green eyes of her future legal adviser, scared Mme. Cibot. Fraisier's presence so pervaded the room, that any one might have thought there was pestilence in the air; and in a flash Mme. Cibot understood why Mme. Florimond had not become Mme. Fraisier.

"Poulain told me about you, my dear madame," said the lawyer, in the unnatural fashion commonly described by the words "mincing tones"; tones sharp, thin, and grating as verjuice, in spite of all his efforts.

Arrived at this point, he tried to draw the skirts of his dressing-gown over a pair of angular knees encased in threadbare felt. The robe was an ancient printed cotton garment, lined with wadding which took the liberty of protruding itself through various slits in it here and there; the weight of this lining had pulled the skirts aside, disclosing a dingy-hued flannel waistcoat beneath. With something of a coxcomb's manner, Fraisier fastened this refractory article of dress, tightening the girdle to define his reedy figure; then with a blow of the tongs, he effected a reconciliation between two burning brands that had long avoided one another, like brothers after a family quarrel. A sudden bright idea struck him, and he rose from his chair.

"Mme. Sauvage!" called he.

"Well?"

"I am not at home to anybody!"

"Eh! bless your life, there's no need to say that!"

"She is my old nurse," the lawyer said in some confusion.

"And she has not recovered her figure yet," remarked the heroine of the Halles.

Fraisier laughed, and drew the bolt lest his housekeeper should interrupt Mme. Cibot's confidences.

"Well, madame, explain your business," said he, making another effort to drape himself in the dressing-gown. "Any one recommended to me by the only friend I have in the world may count upon me—I may say—absolutely."

For half an hour Mme. Cibot talked, and the man of law made no interruption of any sort; his face wore the expression of curious interest with which a young soldier listens to a pensioner of "The Old Guard." Fraisier's silence and acquiescence, the rapt attention with which he appeared to listen to a torrent of gossip similar to the samples previously given, dispelled some of the prejudices inspired in La Cibot's mind by his squalid surroundings. The little lawyer with the black-speckled green eyes was in reality making a study of his client. When at length she came to a stand and looked to him to speak, he was seized with a fit of the complaint known as a "churchyard cough," and had recourse to an earthenware basin half full of herb tea, which he drained.

"But for Poulain, my dear madame, I should have been dead before this," said Fraisier, by way of answer to the portress' look of motherly compassion; "but he will bring me round, he says—"

As all the client's confidences appeared to have slipped from the memory of her legal adviser, she began to cast about for a way of taking leave of a man so apparently near death.

"In an affair of this kind, madame," continued the attorney from Mantes, suddenly returning to business, "there are two things which it is most important to know. In the first place, whether the property is sufficient to be worth troubling about; and in the second, who the next-of-kin may be; for if the property is the booty, the next-of-kin is the enemy."

La Cibot immediately began to talk of Remonencq and Elie Magus, and said that the shrewd couple valued the pictures at six hundred thousand francs.

"Would they take them themselves at that price?" inquired the lawyer. "You see, madame, that men of business are shy of pictures. A picture may mean a piece of canvas worth a couple of francs or a painting worth two hundred thousand. Now, paintings worth two hundred thousand francs are usually well known; and what errors in judgment people make in estimating even the most famous pictures of all! There was once a great capitalist whose collection was admired, visited, and engraved—actually engraved! He was supposed to have spent millions of francs on it. He died, as men must, and—well, his genuine pictures did not fetch more than two hundred thousand francs! You must let me see these gentlemen.—Now for the next-of-kin," and Fraisier again relapsed into his attitude of listener.

When President Camusot's name came up, he nodded with a grimace which riveted Mme. Cibot's attention. She tried to read the forehead and the villainous face, and found what is called in business a "wooden head."

"Yes, my dear sir," repeated La Cibot. "Yes, my M. Pons is own cousin to President Camusot de Marville; he tells me that ten times a day. M. Camusot the silk mercer was married twice—"

"He that has just been nominated for a peer of France?—"

"And his first wife was a Mlle. Pons, M. Pons' first cousin."

"Then they are first cousins once removed—"

"They are 'not cousins.' They have quarreled."

It may be remembered that before M. Camusot de Marville came to Paris, he was President of the Tribunal of Mantes for five years; and not only was his name still remembered there, but he had kept up a correspondence with Mantes. Camusot's immediate successor, the judge with whom he had been most intimate during his term of office, was still President of the Tribunal, and consequently knew all about Fraisier.

"Do you know, madame," Fraisier said, when at last the red sluices of La Cibot's torrent tongue were closed, "do you know that your principal enemy will be a man who can send you to the scaffold?"

The portress started on her chair, making a sudden spring like a jack-in-the-box.

"Calm yourself, dear madame," continued Fraisier. "You may not have known the name of the President of the Chamber of Indictments at the Court of Appeal in Paris; but you ought to have known that M. Pons must have an heir-at-law. M. le President de Marville is your invalid's sole heir; but as he is a collateral in the third degree, M. Pons is entitled by law to leave his fortune as he pleases. You are not aware either that, six weeks ago at least, M. le President's daughter married the eldest son of M. le Comte Popinot, peer of France, once Minister of Agriculture, and President of the Board of Trade, one of the most influential politicians of the day. President de Marville is even more formidable through this marriage than in his own quality of head of the Court of Assize."

At that word La Cibot shuddered.

"Yes, and it is he who sends you there," continued Fraisier. "Ah! my dear madame, you little know what a red robe means! It is bad enough to have a plain black gown against you! You see me here, ruined, bald, broken in health—all because, unwittingly, I crossed a mere attorney for the crown in the provinces. I was forced to sell my connection at a loss, and very lucky I was to come off with the loss of my money. If I had tried to stand out, my professional position would have gone as well.

"One thing more you do not know," he continued, "and this it is. If you had only to do with President Camusot himself, it would be nothing; but he has a wife, mind you!—and if you ever find yourself face to face with that wife, you will shake in your shoes as if you were on the first step of the scaffold, your hair will stand on end. The Presidente is so vindictive that she would spend ten years over setting a trap to kill you. She sets that husband of hers spinning like a top. Through her a charming young fellow committed suicide at the Conciergerie. A count was accused of forgery—she made his character as white as snow. She all but drove a person of the highest quality from the Court of Charles X. Finally, she displaced the Attorney-General, M. de Granville—"

"That lived in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, at the corner of the Rue Saint-Francois?"

"The very same. They say that she means to make her husband Home Secretary, and I do not know that she will not gain her end.—If she were to take it into her head to send us both to the Criminal Court first and the hulks afterwards—I should apply for a passport and set sail for America, though I am as innocent as a new-born babe. So well I know what justice means. Now, see here, my dear Mme. Cibot; to marry her only daughter to young Vicomte Popinot (heir to M. Pillerault, your landlord, it is said)—to make that match, she stripped herself of her whole fortune, so much so that the President and his wife have nothing at this moment except his official salary. Can you suppose, my dear madame, that under the circumstances Mme. la Presidente will let M. Pons' property go out of the family without a word?—Why, I would sooner face guns loaded with grape-shot than have such a woman for my enemy—"

"But they have quarreled," put in La Cibot.

"What has that got to do with it?" asked Fraisier. "It is one reason the more for fearing her. To kill a relative of whom you are tired, is something; but to inherit his property afterwards—that is a real pleasure!"

"But the old gentleman has a horror of his relatives. He says over and over again that these people—M. Cardot, M. Berthier, and the rest of them (I can't remember their names)—have crushed him as a tumbril cart crushes an egg—"

"Have you a mind to be crushed too?"

"Oh dear! oh dear!" cried La Cibot. "Ah! Ma'am Fontaine was right when she said that I should meet with difficulties: still, she said that I should succeed—"

"Listen, my dear Mme. Cibot.—As for making some thirty thousand francs out of this business—that is possible; but for the whole of the property, it is useless to think of it. We talked over your case yesterday evening, Dr. Poulain and I—"

La Cibot started again.

"Well, what is the matter?"

"But if you knew about the affair, why did you let me chatter away like a magpie?"

"Mme. Cibot, I knew all about your business, but I knew nothing of Mme. Cibot. So many clients, so many characters—"

Mme. Cibot gave her legal adviser a queer look at this; all her suspicions gleamed in her eyes. Fraisier saw this.

"I resume," he continued. "So, our friend Poulain was once called in by you to attend old M. Pillerault, the Countess Popinot's great-uncle; that is one of your claims to my devotion. Poulain goes to see your landlord (mark this!) once a fortnight; he learned all these particulars from him. M. Pillerault was present at his grand-nephew's wedding—for he is an uncle with money to leave; he has an income of fifteen thousand francs, though he has lived like a hermit for the last five-and-twenty years, and scarcely spends a thousand crowns—well, he told Poulain all about this marriage. It seems that your old musician was precisely the cause of the row; he tried to disgrace his own family by way of revenge.—If you only hear one bell, you only hear one sound.—Your invalid says that he meant no harm, but everybody thinks him a monster of—"

"And it would not astonish me if he was!" cried La Cibot. "Just imagine it!—For these ten years past I have been money out of pocket for him, spending my savings on him, and he knows it, and yet he will not let me lie down to sleep on a legacy!—No, sir! he will not. He is obstinate, a regular mule he is.—I have talked to him these ten days, and the cross-grained cur won't stir no more than a sign-post. He shuts his teeth and looks at me like—The most that he would say was that he would recommend me to M. Schmucke."

"Then he means to make his will in favor of this Schmucke?"

"Everything will go to him—"

"Listen, my dear Mme. Cibot, if I am to arrive at any definite conclusions and think of a plan, I must know M. Schmucke. I must see the property and have some talk with this Jew of whom you speak; and then, let me direct you—"

"We shall see, M. Fraisier."

"What is this? 'We shall see?'" repeated Fraisier, speaking in the voice natural to him, as he gave La Cibot a viperous glance. "Am I your legal adviser or am I not, I say? Let us know exactly where we stand."

La Cibot felt that he read her thoughts. A cold chill ran down her back.

"I have told you all I know," she said. She saw that she was at the tiger's mercy.

"We attorneys are accustomed to treachery. Just think carefully over your position; it is superb.—If you follow my advice point by point, you will have thirty or forty thousand francs. But there is a reverse side to this beautiful medal. How if the Presidente comes to hear that M. Pons' property is worth a million of francs, and that you mean to have a bit out of it?—for there is always somebody ready to take that kind of errand—" he added parenthetically.

This remark, and the little pause that came before and after it, sent another shudder through La Cibot. She thought at once that Fraisier himself would probably undertake that office.

"And then, my dear client, in ten minutes old Pillerault is asked to dismiss you, and then on a couple of hours' notice—"

"What does that matter to me?" said La Cibot, rising to her feet like a Bellona; "I shall stay with the gentlemen as their housekeeper."

"And then, a trap will be set for you, and some fine morning you and your husband will wake up in a prison cell, to be tried for your lives—"

"I?" cried La Cibot, "I that have not a farthing that doesn't belong to me?... I!... I!"

For five minutes she held forth, and Fraisier watched the great artist before him as she executed a concerto of self-praise. He was quite untouched, and even amused by the performance. His keen glances pricked La Cibot like stilettos; he chuckled inwardly, till his shrunken wig was shaking with laughter. He was a Robespierre at an age when the Sylla of France was make couplets.

"And how? and why? And on what pretext?" demanded she, when she had come to an end.

"You wish to know how you may come to the guillotine?"

La Cibot turned pale as death at the words; the words fell like a knife upon her neck. She stared wildly at Fraisier.

"Listen to me, my dear child," began Fraisier, suppressing his inward satisfaction at his client's discomfiture.

"I would sooner leave things as they are—" murmured La Cibot, and she rose to go.

"Stay," Fraisier said imperiously. "You ought to know the risks that you are running; I am bound to give you the benefit of my lights.—You are dismissed by M. Pillerault, we will say; there is no doubt about that, is there? You enter the service of these two gentlemen. Very good! That is a declaration of war against the Presidente. You mean to do everything you can to gain possession of the property, and to get a slice of it at any rate—

"Oh, I am not blaming you," Fraisier continued, in answer to a gesture from his client. "It is not my place to do so. This is a battle, and you will be led on further than you think for. One grows full of one's ideas, one hits hard—"

Another gesture of denial. This time La Cibot tossed her head.

"There, there, old lady," said Fraisier, with odious familiarity, "you will go a very long way!—"

"You take me for a thief, I suppose?"

"Come, now, mamma, you hold a receipt in M. Schmucke's hand which did not cost you much.—Ah! you are in the confessional, my lady! Don't deceive your confessor, especially when the confessor has the power of reading your thoughts."

La Cibot was dismayed by the man's perspicacity; now she knew why he had listened to her so intently.

"Very good," continued he, "you can admit at once that the Presidente will not allow you to pass her in the race for the property.—You will be watched and spied upon.—You get your name into M. Pons' will; nothing could be better. But some fine day the law steps in, arsenic is found in a glass, and you and your husband are arrested, tried, and condemned for attempting the life of the Sieur Pons, so as to come by your legacy. I once defended a poor woman at Versailles; she was in reality as innocent as you would be in such a case. Things were as I have told you, and all that I could do was to save her life. The unhappy creature was sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude. She is working out her time now at St. Lazare."

Mme. Cibot's terror grew to the highest pitch. She grew paler and paler, staring at the little, thin man with the green eyes, as some wretched Moor, accused of adhering to her own religion, might gaze at the inquisitor who doomed her to the stake.

"Then, do you tell me, that if I leave you to act, and put my interests in your hands, I shall get something without fear?"

"I guarantee you thirty thousand francs," said Fraisier, speaking like a man sure of the fact.

"After all, you know how fond I am of dear Dr. Poulain," she began again in her most coaxing tones; "he told me to come to you, worthy man, and he did not send me here to be told that I shall be guillotined for poisoning some one."

The thought of the guillotine so moved her that she burst into tears, her nerves were shaken, terror clutched at her heart, she lost her head. Fraisier gloated over his triumph. When he saw his client hesitate, he thought that he had lost his chance; he had set himself to frighten and quell La Cibot till she was completely in his power, bound hand and foot. She had walked into his study as a fly walks into a spider's web; there she was doomed to remain, entangled in the toils of the little lawyer who meant to feed upon her. Out of this bit of business, indeed, Fraisier meant to gain the living of old days; comfort, competence, and consideration. He and his friend Dr. Poulain had spent the whole previous evening in a microscopic examination of the case; they had made mature deliberations. The doctor described Schmucke for his friend's benefit, and the alert pair had plumbed all hypotheses and scrutinized all risks and resources, till Fraisier, exultant, cried aloud, "Both our fortunes lie in this!" He had gone so far as to promise Poulain a hospital, and as for himself, he meant to be justice of the peace of an arrondissement.

To be a justice of the peace! For this man with his abundant capacity, for this doctor of law without a pair of socks to his name, the dream was a hippogriff so restive, that he thought of it as a deputy-advocate thinks of the silk gown, as an Italian priest thinks of the tiara. It was indeed a wild dream!

M. Vitel, the justice of the peace before whom Fraisier pleaded, was a man of sixty-nine, in failing health; he talked of retiring on a pension; and Fraisier used to talk with Poulain of succeeding him, much as Poulain talked of saving the life of some rich heiress and marrying her afterwards. No one knows how greedily every post in the gift of authority is sought after in Paris. Every one wants to live in Paris. If a stamp or tobacco license falls in, a hundred women rise up as one and stir all their friends to obtain it. Any vacancy in the ranks of the twenty-four collectors of taxes sends a flood of ambitious folk surging in upon the Chamber of Deputies. Decisions are made in committee, all appointments are made by the Government. Now the salary of a justice of the peace, the lowest stipendiary magistrate in Paris, is about six thousand francs. The post of registrar to the court is worth a hundred thousand francs. Few places are more coveted in the administration. Fraisier, as a justice of the peace, with the head physician of a hospital for his friend, would make a rich marriage himself and a good match for Dr. Poulain. Each would lend a hand to each.

Night set its leaden seal upon the plans made by the sometime attorney of Mantes, and a formidable scheme sprouted up, a flourishing scheme, fertile in harvests of gain and intrigue. La Cibot was the hinge upon which the whole matter turned; and for this reason, any rebellion on the part of the instrument must be at once put down; such action on her part was quite unexpected; but Fraisier had put forth all the strength of his rancorous nature, and the audacious portress lay trampled under his feet.

"Come, reassure yourself, my dear madame," he remarked, holding out his hand. The touch of the cold, serpent-like skin made a terrible impression upon the portress. It brought about something like a physical reaction, which checked her emotion; Mme. Fontaine's toad, Astaroth, seemed to her to be less deadly than this poison-sac that wore a sandy wig and spoke in tones like the creaking of a hinge.

"Do not imagine that I am frightening you to no purpose," Fraisier continued. (La Cibot's feeling of repulsion had not escaped him.) "The affairs which made Mme. la Presidente's dreadful reputation are so well known at the law-courts, that you can make inquiries there if you like. The great person who was all but sent into a lunatic asylum was the Marquis d'Espard. The Marquis d'Esgrignon was saved from the hulks. The handsome young man with wealth and a great future before him, who was to have married a daughter of one of the first families of France, and hanged himself in a cell of the Conciergerie, was the celebrated Lucien de Rubempre; the affair made a great deal of noise in Paris at the time. That was a question of a will. His mistress, the notorious Esther, died and left him several millions, and they accused the young fellow of poisoning her. He was not even in Paris at the time of her death, nor did he so much as know the woman had left the money to him!—One cannot well be more innocent than that! Well, after M. Camusot examined him, he hanged himself in his cell. Law, like medicine, has its victims. In the first case, one man suffers for the many, and in the second, he dies for science," he added, and an ugly smile stole over his lips. "Well, I know the risks myself, you see; poor and obscure little attorney as I am, the law has been the ruin of me. My experience was dearly bought—it is all at your service."

"Thank you, no," said La Cibot; "I will have nothing to do with it, upon my word!... I shall have nourished ingratitude, that is all! I want nothing but my due; I have thirty years of honesty behind me, sir. M. Pons says that he will recommend me to his friend Schmucke; well and good, I shall end my days in peace with the German, good man."

Fraisier had overshot his mark. He had discouraged La Cibot. Now he was obliged to remove these unpleasant impressions.

"Do not let us give up," he said; "just go away quietly home. Come, now, we will steer the affair to a good end."

"But what about my rentes, what am I to do to get them, and—"

"And feel no remorse?" he interrupted quickly. "Eh! it is precisely for that that men of business were invented; unless you keep within the law, you get nothing. You know nothing of law; I know a good deal. I will see that you keep on the right side of it, and you can hold your own in all men's sight. As for your conscience, that is your own affair."