A great change had taken place in the Rue de Hanovre. The Count and Countess Popinot and the young people would not allow the President and his wife to leave the house that they had settled upon their daughter to pay rent elsewhere. M. and Mme. la Presidente, therefore, were installed on the second floor, now left at liberty, for the elderly lady had made up her mind to end her days in the country.

Mme. Camusot took Madeleine Vivet, with her cook and her man-servant, to the second floor, and would have been as much pinched for money as in the early days, if the house had not been rent free, and the President's salary increased to ten thousand francs. This aurea mediocritas was but little satisfactory to Mme. de Marville. Even now she wished for means more in accordance with her ambitions; for when she handed over their fortune to their daughter, she spoiled her husband's prospects. Now Amelie had set her heart upon seeing her husband in the Chamber of Deputies; she was not one of those women who find it easy to give up their way; and she by no means despaired of returning her husband for the arrondissement in which Marville is situated. So for the past two months she had teased her father-in-law, M. le Baron Camusot (for the new peer of France had been advanced to that rank), and done her utmost to extort an advance of a hundred thousand francs of the inheritance which one day would be theirs. She wanted, she said, to buy a small estate worth about two thousand francs per annum set like a wedge within the Marville lands. There she and her husband would be near their children and in their own house, while the addition would round out the Marville property. With that the Presidente laid stress upon the recent sacrifices which she and her husband had been compelled to make in order to marry Cecile to Viscount Popinot, and asked the old man how he could bar his eldest son's way to the highest honors of the magistracy, when such honors were only to be had by those who made themselves a strong position in parliament. Her husband would know how to take up such a position, he would make himself feared by those in office, and so on and so on.

"They do nothing for you unless you tighten a halter round their necks to loosen their tongues," said she. "They are ungrateful. What do they not owe to Camusot! Camusot brought the House of Orleans to the throne by enforcing the ordinances of July."

M. Camusot senior answered that he had gone out of his depth in railway speculations. He quite admitted that it was necessary to come to the rescue, but put off the day until shares should rise, as they were expected to do.

This half-promise, extracted some few days before Fraisier's visit, had plunged the Presidente into depths of affliction. It was doubtful whether the ex-proprietor of Marville was eligible for re-election without the land qualification.

Fraisier found no difficulty in obtaining speech of Madeleine Vivet; such viper natures own their kinship at once.

"I should like to see Mme. la Presidente for a few moments, mademoiselle," Fraisier said in bland accents; "I have come on a matter of business which touches her fortune; it is a question of a legacy, be sure to mention that. I have not the honor of being known to Mme. la Presidente, so my name is of no consequence. I am not in the habit of leaving my chambers, but I know the respect that is due to a President's wife, and I took the trouble of coming myself to save all possible delay."

The matter thus broached, when repeated and amplified by the waiting-maid, naturally brought a favorable answer. It was a decisive moment for the double ambition hidden in Fraisier's mind. Bold as a petty provincial attorney, sharp, rough-spoken, and curt as he was, he felt as captains feel before the decisive battle of a campaign. As he went into the little drawing-room where Amelie was waiting for him, he felt a slight perspiration breaking out upon his forehead and down his back. Every sudorific hitherto employed had failed to produce this result upon a skin which horrible diseases had left impervious. "Even if I fail to make my fortune," said he to himself, "I shall recover. Poulain said that if I could only perspire I should recover."

The Presidente came forward in her morning gown.

"Madame—" said Fraisier, stopping short to bow with the humility by which officials recognize the superior rank of the person whom they address.

"Take a seat, monsieur," said the Presidente. She saw at a glance that this was a man of law.

"Mme. la Presidente, if I take the liberty of calling your attention to a matter which concerns M. le President, it is because I am sure that M. de Marville, occupying, as he does, a high position, would leave matters to take their natural course, and so lose seven or eight hundred thousand francs, a sum which ladies (who, in my opinion, have a far better understanding of private business than the best of magistrates)—a sum which ladies, I repeat, would by no means despise—"

"You spoke of a legacy," interrupted the lady, dazzled by the wealth, and anxious to hide her surprise. Amelie de Marville, like an impatient novel-reader, wanted the end of the story.

"Yes, madame, a legacy that you are like to lose; yes, to lose altogether; but I can, that is, I could, recover it for you, if—"

"Speak out, monsieur." Mme. de Marville spoke frigidly, scanning Fraisier as she spoke with a sagacious eye.

"Madame, your eminent capacity is known to me; I was once at Mantes. M. Leboeuf, President of the Tribunal, is acquainted with M. de Marville, and can answer inquiries about me—"

The Presidente's shrug was so ruthlessly significant, that Fraisier was compelled to make short work of his parenthetic discourse.

"So distinguished a woman will at once understand why I speak of myself in the first place. It is the shortest way to the property."

To this acute observation the lady replied by a gesture. Fraisier took the sign for a permission to continue.

"I was an attorney, madame, at Mantes. My connection was all the fortune that I was likely to have. I took over M. Levroux's practice. You knew him, no doubt?"

The Presidente inclined her head.

"With borrowed capital and some ten thousand francs of my own, I went to Mantes. I had been with Desroches, one of the cleverest attorneys in Paris, I had been his head-clerk for six years. I was so unlucky as to make an enemy of the attorney for the crown at Mantes, Monsieur—"

"Olivier Vinet."

"Son of the Attorney-General, yes, madame. He was paying his court to a little person—"

"Whom?"

"Mme. Vatinelle."

"Oh! Mme. Vatinelle. She was very pretty and very—er—when I was there—"

"She was not unkind to me: inde iroe," Fraisier continued. "I was industrious; I wanted to repay my friends and to marry; I wanted work; I went in search of it; and before long I had more on my hands than anybody else. Bah! I had every soul in Mantes against me—attorneys, notaries, and even the bailiffs. They tried to fasten a quarrel on me. In our ruthless profession, as you know, madame, if you wish to ruin a man, it is soon done. I was concerned for both parties in a case, and they found it out. It was a trifle irregular; but it is sometimes done in Paris, attorneys in certain cases hand the rhubarb and take the senna. They do things differently at Mantes. I had done M. Bouyonnet this little service before; but, egged on by his colleagues and the attorney for the crown, he betrayed me.—I am keeping back nothing, you see.—There was a great hue and cry about it. I was a scoundrel; they made me out blacker than Marat; forced me to sell out; ruined me. And I am in Paris now. I have tried to get together a practice; but my health is so bad, that I have only two quiet hours out of the twenty-four.

"At this moment I have but one ambition, and a very small one. Some day," he continued, "you will be the wife of the Keeper of the Seals, or of the Home Secretary, it may be; but I, poor and sickly as I am, desire nothing but a post in which I can live in peace for the rest of my life, a place without any opening in which to vegetate. I should like to be a justice of the peace in Paris. It would be a mere trifle for you and M. le President to gain the appointment for me; for the present Keeper of the Seals must be anxious to keep on good terms with you . . .

"And that is not all, madame," added Fraisier. Seeing that Mme. de Marville was about to speak, he cut her short with a gesture. "I have a friend, the doctor in attendance on the old man who ought to leave his property to M. le President. (We are coming to the point, you see.) The doctor's co-operation is indispensable, and the doctor is precisely in my position: he has abilities, he is unlucky. I learned through him how far your interests were imperiled; for even as I speak, all may be over, and the will disinheriting M. le President may have been made. This doctor wishes to be head-surgeon of a hospital or of a Government school. He must have a position in Paris equal to mine. . . . Pardon me if I have enlarged on a matter so delicate; but we must have no misunderstandings in this business. The doctor is, besides, much respected and learned; he saved the life of the Comtesse Popinot's great-uncle, M. Pillerault.

"Now, if you are so good as to promise these two posts—the appointment of justice of the peace and the sinecure for my friend—I will undertake to bring you the property, almost intact.—Almost intact, I say, for the co-operation of the legatee and several other persons is absolutely indispensable, and some obligations will be incurred. You will not redeem your promises until I have fulfilled mine."

The Presidente had folded her arms, and for the last minute or two sat like a person compelled to listen to a sermon. Now she unfolded her arms, and looked at Fraisier as she said, "Monsieur, all that you say concerning your interests has the merit of clearness; but my own interests in the matter are by no means so clear—"

"A word or two will explain everything, madame. M. le President is M. Pons' first cousin once removed, and his sole heir. M. Pons is very ill; he is about to make his will, if it is not already made, in favor of a German, a friend of his named Schmucke; and he has more than seven hundred thousand francs to leave. I hope to have an accurate valuation made in two or three days—"

"If this is so," said the Presidente, "I made a great mistake in quarreling with him and throwing the blame——" she thought aloud, amazed by the possibility of such a sum.

"No, madame. If there had been no rupture, he would be as blithe as a lark at this moment, and might outlive you and M. le President and me. . . . The ways of Providence are mysterious, let us not seek to fathom them," he added to palliate to some extent the hideous idea. "It cannot be helped. We men of business look at the practical aspects of things. Now you see clearly, madame, that M. de Marville in his public position would do nothing, and could do nothing, as things are. He has broken off all relations with his cousin. You see nothing now of Pons; you have forbidden him the house; you had excellent reasons, no doubt, for doing as you did, but the old man is ill, and he is leaving his property to the only friend left to him. A President of the Court of Appeal in Paris could say nothing under such circumstances if the will was made out in due form. But between ourselves, madame, when one has a right to expect seven or eight hundred thousand francs—or a million, it may be (how should I know?)—it is very unpleasant to have it slip through one's fingers, especially if one happens to be the heir-at-law. . . . But, on the other hand, to prevent this, one is obliged to stoop to dirty work; work so difficult, so ticklish, bringing you cheek by jowl with such low people, servants and subordinates; and into such close contact with them too, that no barrister, no attorney in Paris could take up such a case.

"What you want is a briefless barrister like me," said he, "a man who should have real and solid ability, who has learned to be devoted, and yet, being in a precarious position, is brought temporarily to a level with such people. In my arrondissement I undertake business for small tradespeople and working folk. Yes, madame, you see the straits to which I have been brought by the enmity of an attorney for the crown, now a deputy-public prosecutor in Paris, who could not forgive me my superiority.—I know you, madame, I know that your influence means a solid certainty; and in such a service rendered to you, I saw the end of my troubles and success for my friend Dr. Poulain."

The lady sat pensive during a moment of unspeakable torture for Fraisier. Vinet, an orator of the Centre, attorney-general (procureur-general) for the past sixteen years, nominated half-a-score of times for the chancellorship, the father, moreover, of the attorney for the crown at Mantes who had been appointed to a post in Paris within the last year—Vinet was an enemy and a rival for the malignant Presidente. The haughty attorney-general did not hide his contempt for President Camusot. This fact Fraisier did not know, and could not know.

"Have you nothing on your conscience but the fact that you were concerned for both parties?" asked she, looking steadily at Fraisier.

"Mme. la Presidente can see M. Leboeuf; M. Leboeuf was favorable to me."

"Do you feel sure that M. Leboeuf will give M. de Marville and M. le Comte Popinot a good account of you?"

"I will answer for it, especially now that M. Olivier Vinet has left Mantes; for between ourselves, good M. Leboeuf was afraid of that crabbed little official. If you will permit me, Madame La Presidente, I will go to Mantes and see M. Leboeuf. No time will be lost, for I cannot be certain of the precise value of the property for two or three days. I do not wish that you should know all the ins and outs of this affair; you ought not to know them, Mme. la Presidente, but is not the reward that I expect for my complete devotion a pledge of my success?"

"Very well. If M. Leboeuf will speak in your favor, and if the property is worth as much as you think (I doubt it myself), you shall have both appointments, if you succeed, mind you—"

"I will answer for it, madame. Only, you must be so good as to have your notary and your attorney here when I shall need them; you must give me a power of attorney to act for M. le President, and tell those gentlemen to follow my instructions, and to do nothing on their own responsibility."

"The responsibility rests with you," the Presidente answered solemnly, "so you ought to have full powers.—But is M. Pons very ill?" she asked, smiling.

"Upon my word, madame, he might pull through, especially with so conscientious a doctor as Poulain in attendance; for this friend of mine, madame, is simply an unconscious spy directed by me in your interests. Left to himself, he would save the old man's life; but there is some one else by the sickbed, a portress, who would push him into the grave for thirty thousand francs. Not that she would kill him outright; she will not give him arsenic, she is not so merciful; she will do worse, she will kill him by inches; she will worry him to death day by day. If the poor old man were kept quiet and left in peace; if he were taken into the country and cared for and made much of by friends, he would get well again; but he is harassed by a sort of Mme. Evrard. When the woman was young she was one of thirty Belles Ecailleres, famous in Paris, she is a rough, greedy, gossiping woman; she torments him to make a will and to leave her something handsome, and the end of it will be induration of the liver, calculi are possibly forming at this moment, and he has not enough strength to bear an operation. The doctor, noble soul, is in a horrible predicament. He really ought to send the woman away—"

"Why, then, this vixen is a monster!" cried the lady in thin flute-like tones.

Fraisier smiled inwardly at the likeness between himself and the terrible Presidente; he knew all about those suave modulations of a naturally sharp voice. He thought of another president, the hero of an anecdote related by Louis XI., stamped by that monarch's final praise. Blessed with a wife after the pattern of Socrates' spouse, and ungifted with the sage's philosophy, he mingled salt with the corn in the mangers and forbad the grooms to give water to the horses. As his wife rode along the Seine towards their country-house, the animals bolted into the river with the lady, and the magistrate returned thanks to Providence for ridding him of his wife "in so natural a manner." At this present moment Mme. de Marville thanked Heaven for placing at Pons' bedside a woman so likely to get him "decently" out of the way.

Aloud she said, "I would not take a million at the price of a single scruple.—Your friend ought to speak to M. Pons and have the woman sent away."

"In the first place, madame, Messrs. Schmucke and Pons think the woman an angel; they would send my friend away. And secondly, the doctor lies under an obligation to this horrid oyster-woman; she called him in to attend M. Pillerault. When he tells her to be as gentle as possible with the patient, he simply shows the creature how to make matters worse."

"What does your friend think of my cousin's condition?"

This man's clear, business-like way of putting the facts of the case frightened Mme. de Marville; she felt that his keen gaze read the thoughts of a heart as greedy as La Cibot's own.

"In six weeks the property will change hands."

The Presidente dropped her eyes.

"Poor man!" she sighed, vainly striving after a dolorous expression.

"Have you any message, madame, for M. Leboeuf? I am taking the train to Mantes."

"Yes. Wait a moment, and I will write to ask him to dine with us to-morrow. I want to see him, so that he may act in concert to repair the injustice to which you have fallen a victim."

The Presidente left the room. Fraisier saw himself a justice of the peace. He felt transformed at the thought; he grew stouter; his lungs were filled with the breath of success, the breeze of prosperity. He dipped into the mysterious reservoirs of volition for fresh and strong doses of the divine essence. To reach success, he felt, as Remonencq half felt, that he was ready for anything, for crime itself, provided that no proofs of it remained. He had faced the Presidente boldly; he had transmuted conjecture into reality; he had made assertions right and left, all to the end that she might authorize him to protect her interests and win her influence. As he stood there, he represented the infinite misery of two lives, and the no less boundless desires of two men. He spurned the squalid horrors of the Rue de la Perle. He saw the glitter of a thousand crowns in fees from La Cibot, and five thousand francs from the Presidente. This meant an abode such as befitted his future prospects. Finally, he was repaying Dr. Poulain.

There are hard, ill-natured beings, goaded by distress or disease into active malignity, that yet entertain diametrically opposed sentiments with a like degree of vehemence. If Richelieu was a good hater, he was no less a good friend. Fraisier, in his gratitude, would have let himself be cut in two for Poulain.

So absorbed was he in these visions of a comfortable and prosperous life, that he did not see the Presidente come in with the letter in her hand, and she, looking at him, thought him less ugly now than at first. He was about to be useful to her, and as soon as a tool belongs to us we look upon it with other eyes.

"M. Fraisier," said she, "you have convinced me of your intelligence, and I think that you can speak frankly."

Fraisier replied by an eloquent gesture.

"Very well," continued the lady, "I must ask you to give a candid reply to this question: Are we, either of us, M. de Marville or I, likely to be compromised, directly or indirectly, by your action in this matter?"

"I would not have come to you, madame, if I thought that some day I should have to reproach myself for bringing so much as a splash of mud upon you, for in your position a speck the size of a pin's head is seen by all the world. You forget, madame, that I must satisfy you if I am to be a justice of the peace in Paris. I have received one lesson at the outset of my life; it was so sharp that I do not care to lay myself open to a second thrashing. To sum it up in a last word, madame, I will not take a step in which you are indirectly involved without previously consulting you—"

"Very good. Here is the letter. And now I shall expect to be informed of the exact value of the estate."

"There is the whole matter," said Fraisier shrewdly, making his bow to the Presidente with as much graciousness as his countenance could exhibit.

"What a providence!" thought Mme. Camusot de Marville. "So I am to be rich! Camusot will be sure of his election if we let loose this Fraisier upon the Bolbec constituency. What a tool!"

"What a providence!" Fraisier said to himself as he descended the staircase; "and what a sharp woman Mme. Camusot is! I should want a woman in these circumstances. Now to work!"

And he departed for Mantes to gain the good graces of a man he scarcely knew; but he counted upon Mme. Vatinelle, to whom, unfortunately, he owed all his troubles—and some troubles are of a kind that resemble a protested bill while the defaulter is yet solvent, in that they bear interest.

Three days afterwards, while Schmucke slept (for in accordance with the compact he now sat up at night with the patient), La Cibot had a "tiff," as she was pleased to call it, with Pons. It will not be out of place to call attention to one particularly distressing symptom of liver complaint. The sufferer is always more or less inclined to impatience and fits of anger; an outburst of this kind seems to give relief at the time, much as a patient while the fever fit is upon him feels that he has boundless strength; but collapse sets in so soon as the excitement passes off, and the full extent of mischief sustained by the system is discernible. This is especially the case when the disease has been induced by some great shock; and the prostration is so much the more dangerous because the patient is kept upon a restricted diet. It is a kind of fever affecting neither the blood nor the brain, but the humoristic mechanism, fretting the whole system, producing melancholy, in which the patient hates himself; in such a crisis anything may cause dangerous irritation.

In spite of all that the doctor could say, La Cibot had no belief in this wear and tear of the nervous system by the humoristic. She was a woman of the people, without experience or education; Dr. Poulain's explanations for her were simply "doctor's notions." Like most of her class, she thought that sick people must be fed, and nothing short of Dr. Poulain's direct order prevented her from administering ham, a nice omelette, or vanilla chocolate upon the sly.

The infatuation of the working classes on this point is very strong. The reason of their reluctance to enter a hospital is the idea that they will be starved there. The mortality caused by the food smuggled in by the wives of patients on visiting-days was at one time so great that the doctors were obliged to institute a very strict search for contraband provisions.

If La Cibot was to realize her profits at once, a momentary quarrel must be worked up in some way. She began by telling Pons about her visit to the theatre, not omitting her passage at arms with Mlle. Heloise the dancer.

"But why did you go?" the invalid asked for the third time. La Cibot once launched on a stream of words, he was powerless to stop her.

"So, then, when I had given her a piece of my mind, Mademoiselle Heloise saw who I was and knuckled under, and we were the best of friends.—And now do you ask me why I went?" she added, repeating Pons' question.

There are certain babblers, babblers of genius are they, who sweep up interruptions, objections, and observations in this way as they go along, by way of provision to swell the matter of their conversation, as if that source were ever in any danger of running dry.

"Why I went?" repeated she. "I went to get your M. Gaudissart out of a fix. He wants some music for a ballet, and you are hardly fit to scribble on sheets of paper and do your work, dearie.—So I understood, things being so, that a M. Garangeot was to be asked to set the Mohicans to music—"

"Garangeot!" roared Pons in fury. "Garangeot! a man with no talent; I would not have him for first violin! He is very clever, he is very good at musical criticism, but as to composing—I doubt it! And what the devil put the notion of going to the theatre into your head?"

"How confoundedly contrairy the man is! Look here, dearie, we mustn't boil over like milk on the fire! How are you to write music in the state that you are in? Why, you can't have looked at yourself in the glass! Will you have the glass and see? You are nothing but skin and bone—you are as weak as a sparrow, and do you think that you are fit to make your notes! why, you would not so much as make out mine. . . . And that reminds me that I ought to go up to the third floor lodger's that owes us seventeen francs, for when the chemist has been paid we shall not have twenty left.—So I had to tell M. Gaudissart (I like that name), a good sort he seems to be,—a regular Roger Bontemps that would just suit me.—He will never have liver complaint!—Well, so I had to tell him how you were.—Lord! you are not well, and he has put some one else in your place for a bit—"

"Some one else in my place!" cried Pons in a terrible voice, as he sat right up in bed. Sick people, generally speaking, and those most particularly who lie within the sweep of the scythe of Death, cling to their places with the same passionate energy that the beginner displays to gain a start in life. To hear that someone had taken his place was like a foretaste of death to the dying man.

"Why, the doctor told me that I was going on as well as possible," continued he; "he said that I should soon be about again as usual. You have killed me, ruined me, murdered me!"

"Tut, tut, tut!" cried La Cibot, "there you go! I am killing you, am I? Mercy on us! these are the pretty things that you are always telling M. Schmucke when my back is turned. I hear all that you say, that I do! You are a monster of ingratitude."

"But you do not know that if I am only away for another fortnight, they will tell me that I have had my day, that I am old-fashioned, out of date, Empire, rococo, when I go back. Garangeot will have made friends all over the theatre, high and low. He will lower the pitch to suit some actress that cannot sing, he will lick M. Gaudissart's boots!" cried the sick man, who clung to life. "He has friends that will praise him in all the newspapers; and when things are like that in such a shop, Mme. Cibot, they can find holes in anybody's coat. . . . What fiend drove you to do it?"

"Why! plague take it, M. Schmucke talked it over with me for a week. What would you have? You see nothing but yourself! You are so selfish that other people may die if you can only get better.—Why poor M. Schmucke has been tired out this month past! he is tied by the leg, he can go nowhere, he cannot give lessons nor take his place at the theatre. Do you really see nothing? He sits up with you at night, and I take the nursing in the day. If I were to sit up at night with you, as I tried to do at first when I thought you were so poor, I should have to sleep all day. And who would see to the house and look out for squalls! Illness is illness, it cannot be helped, and here are you—"

"This was not Schmucke's idea, it is quite impossible—"

"That means that it was I who took it into my head to do it, does it? Do you think that we are made of iron? Why, if M. Schmucke had given seven or eight lessons every day and conducted the orchestra every evening at the theatre from six o'clock till half-past eleven at night, he would have died in ten days' time. Poor man, he would give his life for you, and do you want to be the death of him? By the authors of my days, I have never seen a sick man to match you! Where are your senses? have you put them in pawn? We are all slaving our lives out for you; we do all for the best, and you are not satisfied! Do you want to drive us raging mad? I myself, to begin with, am tired out as it is——"

La Cibot rattled on at her ease; Pons was too angry to say a word. He writhed on his bed, painfully uttering inarticulate sounds; the blow was killing him. And at this point, as usual, the scolding turned suddenly to tenderness. The nurse dashed at her patient, grasped him by the head, made him lie down by main force, and dragged the blankets over him.

"How any one can get into such a state!" exclaimed she. "After all, it is your illness, dearie. That is what good M. Poulain says. See now, keep quiet and be good, my dear little sonny. Everybody that comes near you worships you, and the doctor himself comes to see you twice a day. What would he say if he found you in such a way? You put me out of all patience; you ought not to behave like this. If you have Ma'am Cibot to nurse you, you should treat her better. You shout and you talk!—you ought not to do it, you know that. Talking irritates you. And why do you fly into a passion? The wrong is all on your side; you are always bothering me. Look here, let us have it out! If M. Schmucke and I, who love you like our life, thought that we were doing right —well, my cherub, it was right, you may be sure."

"Schmucke never could have told you to go to the theatre without speaking to me about it—"

"And must I wake him, poor dear, when he is sleeping like one of the blest, and call him in as a witness?"

"No, no!" cried Pons. "If my kind and loving Schmucke made the resolution, perhaps I am worse than I thought." His eyes wandered round the room, dwelling on the beautiful things in it with a melancholy look painful to see.

"So I must say good-bye to my dear pictures, to all the things that have come to be like so many friends to me . . . and to my divine friend Schmucke? . . . Oh! can it be true?"

La Cibot, acting her heartless comedy, held her handkerchief to her eyes; and at that mute response the sufferer fell to dark musing—so sorely stricken was he by the double stab dealt to health and his interests by the loss of his post and the near prospect of death, that he had no strength left for anger. He lay, ghastly and wan, like a consumptive patient after a wrestling bout with the Destroyer.

"In M. Schmucke's interests, you see, you would do well to send for M. Trognon; he is the notary of the quarter and a very good man," said La Cibot, seeing that her victim was completely exhausted.

"You are always talking about this Trognon—"

"Oh! he or another, it is all one to me, for anything you will leave me."

She tossed her head to signify that she despised riches. There was silence in the room.

A moment later Schmucke came in. He had slept for six hours, hunger awakened him, and now he stood at Pons' bedside watching his friend without saying a word, for Mme. Cibot had laid a finger on her lips.

"Hush!" she whispered. Then she rose and went up to add under her breath, "He is going off to sleep at last, thank Heaven! He is as cross as a red donkey!—What can you expect, he is struggling with his illness——"

"No, on the contrary, I am very patient," said the victim in a weary voice that told of a dreadful exhaustion; "but, oh! Schmucke, my dear friend, she has been to the theatre to turn me out of my place."

There was a pause. Pons was too weak to say more. La Cibot took the opportunity and tapped her head significantly. "Do not contradict him," she said to Schmucke; "it would kill him."

Pons gazed into Schmucke's honest face. "And she says that you sent her—" he continued.

"Yes," Schmucke affirmed heroically. "It had to pe. Hush!—let us safe your life. It is absurd to vork and train your sdrength gif you haf a dreasure. Get better; ve vill sell some prick-a-prack und end our tays kvietly in a corner somveres, mit kind Montame Zipod."

"She has perverted you," moaned Pons.

Mme. Cibot had taken up her station behind the bed to make signals unobserved. Pons thought that she had left the room. "She is murdering me," he added.

"What is that? I am murdering you, am I?" cried La Cibot, suddenly appearing, hand on hips and eyes aflame. "I am as faithful as a dog, and this is all I get! God Almighty!—"

She burst into tears and dropped down into the great chair, a tragical movement which wrought a most disastrous revulsion in Pons.

"Very good," she said, rising to her feet. The woman's malignant eyes looked poison and bullets at the two friends. "Very good. Nothing that I can do is right here, and I am tired of slaving my life out. You shall take a nurse."

Pons and Schmucke exchanged glances in dismay.

"Oh! you may look at each other like actors. I mean it. I shall ask Dr. Poulain to find a nurse for you. And now we will settle accounts. You shall pay me back the money that I have spent on you, and that I would never have asked you for, I that have gone to M. Pillerault to borrow another five hundred francs of him—"

"It ees his illness!" cried Schmucke—he sprang to Mme. Cibot and put an arm round her waist—"haf batience."

"As for you, you are an angel, I could kiss the ground you tread upon," said she. "But M. Pons never liked me, he always hated me. Besides, he thinks perhaps that I want to be mentioned in his will—"

"Hush! you vill kill him!" cried Schmucke.

"Good-bye, sir," said La Cibot, with a withering look at Pons. "You may keep well for all the harm I wish you. When you can speak to me pleasantly, when you can believe that what I do is done for the best, I will come back again. Till then I shall stay in my own room. You were like my own child to me; did anybody ever see a child revolt against its mother? . . . No, no, M. Schmucke, I do not want to hear more. I will bring you your dinner and wait upon you, but you must take a nurse. Ask M. Poulain about it."

And she went out, slamming the door after her so violently that the precious, fragile objects in the room trembled. To Pons in his torture, the rattle of china was like the final blow dealt by the executioner to a victim broken on the wheel.

An hour later La Cibot called to Schmucke through the door, telling him that his dinner was waiting for him in the dining-room. She would not cross the threshold. Poor Schmucke went out to her with a haggard, tear-stained face.

"Mein boor Bons in vandering," said he; "he says dat you are ein pad voman. It ees his illness," he added hastily, to soften La Cibot and excuse his friend.

"Oh, I have had enough of his illness! Look here, he is neither father, nor husband, nor brother, nor child of mine. He has taken a dislike to me; well and good, that is enough! As for you, you see, I would follow you to the end of the world; but when a woman gives her life, her heart, and all her savings, and neglects her husband (for here has Cibot fallen ill), and then hears that she is a bad woman—it is coming it rather too strong, it is."

"Too shtrong?"

"Too strong, yes. Never mind idle words. Let us come to the facts. As to that, you owe me for three months at a hundred and ninety francs —that is five hundred seventy francs; then there is the rent that I have paid twice (here are the receipts), six hundred more, including rates and the sou in the franc for the porter—something under twelve hundred francs altogether, and with the two thousand francs besides —without interest, mind you—the total amounts to three thousand one hundred and ninety-two francs. And remember that you will want at least two thousand francs before long for the doctor, and the nurse, and the medicine, and the nurse's board. That was why I borrowed a thousand francs of M. Pillerault," and with that she held up Gaudissart's bank-note.

It may readily be conceived that Schmucke listened to this reckoning with amazement, for he knew about as much of business as a cat knows of music.

"Montame Zipod," he expostulated, "Bons haf lost his head. Bardon him, and nurse him as before, und pe our profidence; I peg it of you on mine knees," and he knelt before La Cibot and kissed the tormentor's hands.

La Cibot raised Schmucke and kissed him on the forehead. "Listen, my lamb," said she, "here is Cibot ill in bed; I have just sent for Dr. Poulain. So I ought to set my affairs in order. And what is more, Cibot saw me crying, and flew into such a passion that he will not have me set foot in here again. It is he who wants the money; it is his, you see. We women can do nothing when it comes to that. But if you let him have his money back again—the three thousand two hundred francs—he will be quiet perhaps. Poor man, it is his all, earned by the sweat of his brow, the savings of twenty-six years of life together. He must have his money to-morrow; there is no getting round him.—You do not know Cibot; when he is angry he would kill a man. Well, I might perhaps get leave of him to look after you both as before. Be easy. I will just let him say anything that comes into his head. I will bear it all for love of you, an angel as you are."

"No, I am ein boor man, dot lof his friend and vould gif his life to save him—"

"But the money?" broke in La Cibot. "My good M. Schmucke, let us suppose that you pay me nothing; you will want three thousand francs, and where are they to come from? Upon my word, do you know what I should do in your place? I should not think twice, I should just sell seven or eight good-for-nothing pictures and put up some of those instead that are standing in your closet with their faces to the wall for want of room. One picture or another, what difference does it make?"

"Und vy?"

"He is so cunning. It is his illness, for he is a lamb when he is well. He is capable of getting up and prying about; and if by any chance he went into the salon, he is so weak that he could not go beyond the door; he would see that they are all still there."

"Drue!"

"And when he is quite well, we will tell him about the sale. And if you wish to confess, throw it all upon me, say that you were obliged to pay me. Come! I have a broad back—"

"I cannot tispose of dings dot are not mine," the good German answered simply.

"Very well. I will summons you, you and M. Pons."

"It vould kill him—"

"Take your choice! Dear me, sell the pictures and tell him about it afterwards . . . you can show him the summons—"

"Ver' goot. Summons us. Dot shall pe mine egscuse. I shall show him der chudgment."

Mme. Cibot went down to the court, and that very day at seven o'clock she called to Schmucke. Schmucke found himself confronted with M. Tabareau the bailiff, who called upon him to pay. Schmucke made answer, trembling from head to foot, and was forthwith summoned together with Pons, to appear in the county court to hear judgment against him. The sight of the bailiff and a bit of stamped paper covered with scrawls produced such an effect upon Schmucke, that he held out no longer.

"Sell die bictures," he said, with tears in his eyes.

Next morning, at six o'clock, Elie Magus and Remonencq took down the paintings of their choice. Two receipts for two thousand five hundred francs were made out in correct form:—

"I, the undersigned, representing M. Pons, acknowledge the receipt of two thousand five hundred francs from M. Elie Magus for the four pictures sold to him, the said sum being appropriated to the use of M. Pons. The first picture, attributed to Durer, is a portrait of a woman; the second, likewise a portrait, is of the Italian School; the third, a Dutch landscape by Breughel; and the fourth, a Holy Family by an unknown master of the Florentine School."

Remonencq's receipt was worded in precisely the same way; a Greuze, a Claude Lorraine, a Rubens, and a Van Dyck being disguised as pictures of the French and Flemish schools.

"Der monny makes me beleef dot the chimcracks haf som value," said Schmucke when the five thousand francs were paid over.

"They are worth something," said Remonencq. "I would willingly give you a hundred thousand francs for the lot."

Remonencq, asked to do a trifling service, hung eight pictures of the proper size in the same frames, taking them from among the less valuable pictures in Schmucke's bedroom.

No sooner was Elie Magus in possession of the four great pictures than he went, taking La Cibot with him, under pretence of settling accounts. But he pleaded poverty, he found fault with the pictures, they needed rebacking, he offered La Cibot thirty thousand francs by way of commission, and finally dazzled her with the sheets of paper on which the Bank of France engraves the words "One thousand francs" in capital letters. Magus thereupon condemned Remonencq to pay the like sum to La Cibot, by lending him the money on the security of his four pictures, which he took with him as a guarantee. So glorious were they, that Magus could not bring himself to part with them, and next day he bought them of Remonencq for six thousand francs over and above the original price, and an invoice was duly made out for the four. Mme. Cibot, the richer by sixty-eight thousand francs, once more swore her two accomplices to absolute secrecy. Then she asked the Jew's advice. She wanted to invest the money in such a way that no one should know of it.

"Buy shares in the Orleans Railway," said he; "they are thirty francs below par, you will double your capital in three years. They will give you scraps of paper, which you keep safe in a portfolio."

"Stay here, M. Magus. I will go and fetch the man of business who acts for M. Pons' family. He wants to know how much you will give him for the whole bag of tricks upstairs. I will go for him now."

"If only she were a widow!" said Remonencq when she was gone. "She would just suit me; she will have plenty of money now—"

"Especially if she puts her money into the Orleans Railway; she will double her capital in two years' time. I have put all my poor little savings into it," added the Jew, "for my daughter's portion.—Come, let us take a turn on the boulevard until this lawyer arrives."

"Cibot is very bad as it is," continued Remonencq; "if it should please God to take him to Himself, I should have a famous wife to keep a shop; I could set up on a large scale—"

"Good-day, M. Fraisier," La Cibot began in an ingratiating tone as she entered her legal adviser's office. "Why, what is this that your porter has been telling me? are you going to move?"

"Yes, my dear Mme. Cibot. I am taking the first floor above Dr. Poulain, and trying to borrow two or three thousand francs so as to furnish the place properly; it is very nice, upon my word, the landlord has just papered and painted it. I am acting, as I told you, in President de Marville's interests and yours. . . . I am not a solicitor now; I mean to have my name entered on the roll of barristers, and I must be well lodged. A barrister in Paris cannot have his name on the rolls unless he has decent furniture and books and the like. I am a doctor of law, I have kept my terms, and have powerful interest already. . . . Well, how are we getting on?"

"Perhaps you would accept my savings," said La Cibot. "I have put them in a savings bank. I have not much, only three thousand francs, the fruits of twenty-five years of stinting and scraping. You might give me a bill of exchange, as Remonencq says; for I am ignorant myself, I only know what they tell me."

"No. It is against the rules of the guild for a barrister (avocat) to put his name to a bill. I will give you a receipt, bearing interest at five per cent per annum, on the understanding that if I make an income of twelve hundred francs for you out of old Pons' estate you will cancel it."

La Cibot, caught in the trap, uttered not a word.

"Silence gives consent," Fraisier continued. "Let me have it to-morrow morning."

"Oh! I am quite willing to pay fees in advance," said La Cibot; "it is one way of making sure of my money."

Fraisier nodded. "How are you getting on?" he repeated. "I saw Poulain yesterday; you are hurrying your invalid along, it seems. . . . One more scene such as yesterday's, and gall-stones will form. Be gentle with him, my dear Mme. Cibot, do not lay up remorse for yourself. Life is not too long."

"Just let me alone with your remorse! Are you going to talk about the guillotine again? M. Pons is a contrairy old thing. You don't know him. It is he that bothers me. There is not a more cross-grained man alive; his relations are in the right of it, he is sly, revengeful, and contrairy. . . . M. Magus has come, as I told you, and is waiting to see you."

"Right! I will be there as soon as you. Your income depends upon the price the collection will fetch. If it brings in eight hundred thousand francs, you shall have fifteen hundred francs a year. It is a fortune."

"Very well. I will tell them to value the things on their consciences."



An hour later, Pons was fast asleep. The doctor had ordered a soothing draught, which Schmucke administered, all unconscious that La Cibot had doubled the dose. Fraisier, Remonencq, and Magus, three gallows-birds, were examining the seventeen hundred different objects which formed the old musician's collection one by one.

Schmucke had gone to bed. The three kites, drawn by the scent of a corpse, were masters of the field.

"Make no noise," said La Cibot whenever Magus went into ecstasies or explained the value of some work of art to Remonencq. The dying man slept on in the neighboring room, while greed in four different forms appraised the treasures that he must leave behind, and waited impatiently for him to die—a sight to wring the heart.

Three hours went by before they had finished the salon.

"On an average," said the grimy old Jew, "everything here is worth a thousand francs."

"Seventeen hundred thousand francs!" exclaimed Fraisier in bewilderment.

"Not to me," Magus answered promptly, and his eyes grew dull. "I would not give more than a hundred thousand francs myself for the collection. You cannot tell how long you may keep a thing on hand. . . . There are masterpieces that wait ten years for a buyer, and meanwhile the purchase money is doubled by compound interest. Still, I should pay cash."

"There is stained glass in the other room, as well as enamels and miniatures and gold and silver snuff-boxes," put in Remonencq.

"Can they be seen?" inquired Fraisier.

"I'll see if he is sound asleep," replied La Cibot. She made a sign, and the three birds of prey came in.

"There are masterpieces yonder!" said Magus, indicating the salon, every bristle of his white beard twitching as he spoke. "But the riches are here! And what riches! Kings have nothing more glorious in royal treasuries."

Remonencq's eyes lighted up till they glowed like carbuncles, at the sight of the gold snuff-boxes. Fraisier, cool and calm as a serpent, or some snake-creature with the power of rising erect, stood with his viper head stretched out, in such an attitude as a painter would choose for Mephistopheles. The three covetous beings, thirsting for gold as devils thirst for the dew of heaven, looked simultaneously, as it chanced, at the owner of all this wealth. Some nightmare troubled Pons; he stirred, and suddenly, under the influence of those diabolical glances, he opened his eyes with a shrill cry.

"Thieves! . . . There they are! . . . Help! Murder! Help!"

The nightmare was evidently still upon him, for he sat up in bed, staring before him with blank, wide-open eyes, and had not the power to move.

Elie Magus and Remonencq made for the door, but a word glued them to the spot.

"Magus here! . . . I am betrayed!"

Instinctively the sick man had known that his beloved pictures were in danger, a thought that touched him at least as closely as any dread for himself, and he awoke. Fraisier meanwhile did not stir.

"Mme. Cibot! who is that gentleman?" cried Pons, shivering at the sight.

"Goodness me! how could I put him out of the door?" she inquired, with a wink and gesture for Fraisier's benefit. "This gentleman came just a minute ago, from your family."

Fraisier could not conceal his admiration for La Cibot.

"Yes, sir," he said, "I have come on behalf of Mme. la Presidente de Marville, her husband, and her daughter, to express their regret. They learned quite by accident that you are ill, and they would like to nurse you themselves. They want you to go to Marville and get well there. Mme. la Vicomtesse Popinot, the little Cecile that you love so much, will be your nurse. She took your part with her mother. She convinced Mme. de Marville that she had made a mistake."

"So my next-of-kin have sent you to me, have they?" Pons exclaimed indignantly, "and sent the best judge and expert in all Paris with you to show you the way? Oh! a nice commission!" he cried, bursting into wild laughter. "You have come to value my pictures and curiosities, my snuff-boxes and miniatures! . . . Make your valuation. You have a man there who understands everything, and more—he can buy everything, for he is a millionaire ten times over. . . . My dear relatives will not have long to wait," he added, with bitter irony, "they have choked the last breath out of me. . . . Ah! Mme. Cibot, you said you were a mother to me, and you bring dealers into the house, and my competitor and the Camusots, while I am asleep! . . . Get out, all of you!—"

The unhappy man was beside himself with anger and fear; he rose from the bed and stood upright, a gaunt, wasted figure.

"Take my arm, sir," said La Cibot, rushing to the rescue, lest Pons should fall. "Pray calm yourself, the gentlemen are gone."

"I want to see the salon. . . ." said the death-stricken man. La Cibot made a sign to the three ravens to take flight. Then she caught up Pons as if he had been a feather, and put him in bed again, in spite of his cries. When she saw that he was quite helpless and exhausted, she went to shut the door on the staircase. The three who had done Pons to death were still on the landing; La Cibot told them to wait. She heard Fraisier say to Magus:

"Let me have it in writing, and sign it, both of you. Undertake to pay nine hundred thousand francs in cash for M. Pons' collection, and we will see about putting you in the way of making a handsome profit."

With that he said something to La Cibot in a voice so low that the others could not catch it, and went down after the two dealers to the porter's room.

"Have they gone, Mme. Cibot?" asked the unhappy Pons, when she came back again.

"Gone? . . . who?" asked she.

"Those men."

"What men? There, now, you have seen men," said she. "You have just had a raving fit; if it hadn't been for me you would have gone out the window, and now you are still talking of men in the room. Is it always to be like this?"

"What! was there not a gentleman here just now, saying that my relatives had sent him?"

"Will you still stand me out?" said she. "Upon my word, do you know where you ought to be sent?—To the asylum at Charenton. You see men—"

"Elie Magus, Remonencq, and—"

"Oh! as for Remonencq, you may have seen him, for he came up to tell me that my poor Cibot is so bad that I must clear out of this and come down. My Cibot comes first, you see. When my husband is ill, I can think of nobody else. Try to keep quiet and sleep for a couple of hours; I have sent for Dr. Poulain, and I will come up with him. . . . Take a drink and be good—"

"Then was there no one in the room just now, when I waked? . . ."

"No one," said she. "You must have seen M. Remonencq in one of your looking-glasses."

"You are right, Mme. Cibot," said Pons, meek as a lamb.

"Well, now you are sensible again. . . . Good-bye, my cherub; keep quiet, I shall be back again in a minute."

When Pons heard the outer door close upon her, he summoned up all his remaining strength to rise.

"They are cheating me," he muttered to himself, "they are robbing me! Schmucke is a child that would let them tie him up in a sack."

The terrible scene had seemed so real, it could not be a dream, he thought; a desire to throw light upon the puzzle excited him; he managed to reach the door, opened it after many efforts, and stood on the threshold of his salon. There they were—his dear pictures, his statues, his Florentine bronzes, his porcelain; the sight of them revived him. The old collector walked in his dressing-gown along the narrow spaces between the credence-tables and the sideboards that lined the wall; his feet bare, his head on fire. His first glance of ownership told him that everything was there; he turned to go back to bed again, when he noticed that a Greuze portrait looked out of the frame that had held Sebastian del Piombo's Templar. Suspicion flashed across his brain, making his dark thoughts apparent to him, as a flash of lightning marks the outlines of the cloud-bars on a stormy sky. He looked round for the eight capital pictures of the collection; each one of them was replaced by another. A dark film suddenly overspread his eyes; his strength failed him; he fell fainting upon the polished floor.

So heavy was the swoon, that for two hours he lay as he fell, till Schmucke awoke and went to see his friend, and found him lying unconscious in the salon. With endless pains Schmucke raised the half-dead body and laid it on the bed; but when he came to question the death-stricken man, and saw the look in the dull eyes and heard the vague, inarticulate words, the good German, so far from losing his head, rose to the very heroism of friendship. Man and child as he was, with the pressure of despair came the inspiration of a mother's tenderness, a woman's love. He warmed towels (he found towels!), he wrapped them about Pons' hands, he laid them over the pit of the stomach; he took the cold, moist forehead in his hands, he summoned back life with a might of will worthy of Apollonius of Tyana, laying kisses on his friend's eyelids like some Mary bending over the dead Christ, in a pieta carved in bas-relief by some great Italian sculptor. The divine effort, the outpouring of one life into another, the work of mother and of lover, was crowned with success. In half an hour the warmth revived Pons; he became himself again, the hues of life returned to his eyes, suspended faculties gradually resumed their play under the influence of artificial heat; Schmucke gave him balm-water with a little wine in it; the spirit of life spread through the body; intelligence lighted up the forehead so short a while ago insensible as a stone; and Pons knew that he had been brought back to life, by what sacred devotion, what might of friendship!

"But for you, I should die," he said, and as he spoke he felt the good German's tears falling on his face. Schmucke was laughing and crying at once.

Poor Schmucke! he had waited for those words with a frenzy of hope as costly as the frenzy of despair; and now his strength utterly failed him, he collapsed like a rent balloon. It was his turn to fall; he sank into the easy-chair, clasped his hands, and thanked God in fervent prayer. For him a miracle had just been wrought. He put no belief in the efficacy of the prayer of his deeds; the miracle had been wrought by God in direct answer to his cry. And yet that miracle was a natural effect, such as medical science often records.

A sick man, surrounded by those who love him, nursed by those who wish earnestly that he should live, will recover (other things being equal), when another patient tended by hirelings will die. Doctors decline to see unconscious magnetism in this phenomenon; for them it is the result of intelligent nursing, of exact obedience to their orders; but many a mother knows the virtue of such ardent projection of strong, unceasing prayer.

"My good Schmucke—"

"Say nodings; I shall hear you mit mein heart . . . rest, rest!" said Schmucke, smiling at him.

"Poor friend, noble creature, child of God, living in God! . . . The one being that has loved me. . . ." The words came out with pauses between them; there was a new note, a something never heard before, in Pons' voice. All the soul, so soon to take flight, found utterance in the words that filled Schmucke with happiness almost like a lover's rapture.

"Yes, yes. I shall be shtrong as a lion. I shall vork for two!"

"Listen, my good, my faithful, adorable friend. Let me speak, I have not much time left. I am a dead man. I cannot recover from these repeated shocks."

Schmucke was crying like a child.

"Just listen," continued Pons, "and cry afterwards. As a Christian, you must submit. I have been robbed. It is La Cibot's doing. . . . I ought to open your eyes before I go; you know nothing of life. . . . Somebody has taken away eight of the pictures, and they were worth a great deal of money."

"Vorgif me—I sold dem."

"You sold them?"

"Yes, I," said poor Schmucke. "Dey summoned us to der court—"

"Summoned?. . . . Who summoned us?"

"Wait," said Schmucke. He went for the bit of stamped-paper left by the bailiff, and gave it to Pons. Pons read the scrawl through with close attention, then he let the paper drop and lay quite silent for a while. A close observer of the work of men's hands, unheedful so far of the workings of the brain, Pons finally counted out the threads of the plot woven about him by La Cibot. The artist's fire, the intellect that won the Roman scholarship—all his youth came back to him for a little.

"My good Schmucke," he said at last, "you must do as I tell you, and obey like a soldier. Listen! go downstairs into the lodge and tell that abominable woman that I should like to see the person sent to me by my cousin the President; and that unless he comes, I shall leave my collection to the Musee. Say that a will is in question."

Schmucke went on his errand; but at the first word, La Cibot answered by a smile.

"My good M. Schmucke, our dear invalid has had a delirious fit; he thought that there were men in the room. On my word, as an honest woman, no one has come from the family."

Schmucke went back with his answer, which he repeated word for word.

"She is cleverer, more astute and cunning and wily, than I thought," said Pons with a smile. "She lies even in her room. Imagine it! This morning she brought a Jew here, Elie Magus by name, and Remonencq, and a third whom I do not know, more terrific than the other two put together. She meant to make a valuation while I was asleep; I happened to wake, and saw them all three, estimating the worth of my snuff-boxes. The stranger said, indeed, that the Camusots had sent him here; I spoke to him. . . . That shameless woman stood me out that I was dreaming! . . . My good Schmucke, it was not a dream. I heard the man perfectly plainly; he spoke to me. . . . The two dealers took fright and made for the door. . . . I thought that La Cibot would contradict herself—the experiment failed. . . . I will lay another snare, and trap the wretched woman. . . . Poor Schmucke, you think that La Cibot is an angel; and for this month past she has been killing me by inches to gain her covetous ends. I would not believe that a woman who served us faithfully for years could be so wicked. That doubt has been my ruin. . . . How much did the eight pictures fetch?"

"Vife tausend vrancs."

"Good heavens! they were worth twenty times as much!" cried Pons; "the gems of the collection! I have not time now to institute proceedings; and if I did, you would figure in court as the dupe of those rascals. . . . A lawsuit would be the death of you. You do not know what justice means—a court of justice is a sink of iniquity. . . . At the sight of such horrors, a soul like yours would give way. And besides, you will have enough. The pictures cost me forty thousand francs. I have had them for thirty-six years. . . . Oh, we have been robbed with surprising dexterity. I am on the brink of the grave, I care for nothing now but thee—for thee, the best soul under the sun. . . .

"I will not have you plundered; all that I have is yours. So you must trust nobody, Schmucke, you that have never suspected any one in your life. I know God watches over you, but He may forget for one moment, and you will be seized like a vessel among pirates. . . . La Cibot is a monster! She is killing me; and you think her an angel! You shall see what she is. Go and ask her to give you the name of a notary, and I will show you her with her hand in the bag."

Schmucke listened as if Pons proclaimed an apocalypse. Could so depraved a creature as La Cibot exist? If Pons was right, it seemed to imply that there was no God in the world. He went right down again to Mme. Cibot.

"Mein boor vriend Bons feel so ill," he said, "dat he vish to make his vill. Go und pring ein nodary."

This was said in the hearing of several persons, for Cibot's life was despaired of. Remonencq and his sister, two women from neighboring porters' lodges, two or three servants, and the lodger from the first floor on the side next the street, were all standing outside in the gateway.

"Oh! you can just fetch a notary yourself, and have your will made as you please," cried La Cibot, with tears in her eyes. "My poor Cibot is dying, and it is no time to leave him. I would give all the Ponses in the world to save Cibot, that has never given me an ounce of unhappiness in these thirty years since we were married."

And in she went, leaving Schmucke in confusion.

"Is M. Pons really seriously ill, sir?" asked the first-floor lodger, one Jolivard, a clerk in the registrar's office at the Palais de Justice.

"He nearly died chust now," said Schmucke, with deep sorrow in his voice.

"M. Trognon lives near by in the Rue Saint-Louis," said M. Jolivard, "he is the notary of the quarter."

"Would you like me to go for him?" asked Remonencq.

"I should pe fery glad," said Schmucke; "for gif Montame Zipod cannot pe mit mine vriend, I shall not vish to leaf him in der shtate he is in—"

"Mme. Cibot told us that he was going out of his mind," resumed Jolivard.

"Bons! out off his mind!" cried Schmucke, terror-stricken by the idea. "Nefer vas he so clear in der head . . . dat is chust der reason vy I am anxious for him."

The little group of persons listened to the conversation with a very natural curiosity, which stamped the scene upon their memories. Schmucke did not know Fraisier, and could not note his satanic countenance and glittering eyes. But two words whispered by Fraisier in La Cibot's ear had prompted a daring piece of acting, somewhat beyond La Cibot's range, it may be, though she played her part throughout in a masterly style. To make others believe that the dying man was out of his mind—it was the very corner-stone of the edifice reared by the petty lawyer. The morning's incident had done Fraisier good service; but for him, La Cibot in her trouble might have fallen into the snare innocently spread by Schmucke, when he asked her to send back the person sent by the family.

Remonencq saw Dr. Poulain coming towards them, and asked no better than to vanish. The fact was that for the last ten days the Auvergnat had been playing Providence in a manner singularly displeasing to Justice, which claims the monopoly of that part. He had made up his mind to rid himself at all costs of the one obstacle in his way to happiness, and happiness for him meant capital trebled and marriage with the irresistibly charming portress. He had watched the little tailor drinking his herb-tea, and a thought struck him. He would convert the ailment into mortal sickness; his stock of old metals supplied him with the means.

One morning as he leaned against the door-post, smoking his pipe and dreaming of that fine shop on the Boulevard de la Madeleine where Mme. Cibot, gorgeously arrayed, should some day sit enthroned, his eyes fell upon a copper disc, about the size of a five-franc piece, covered thickly with verdigris. The economical idea of using Cibot's medicine to clean the disc immediately occurred to him. He fastened the thing in a bit of twine, and came over every morning to inquire for tidings of his friend the tailor, timing his visit during La Cibot's visit to her gentlemen upstairs. He dropped the disc into the tumbler, allowed it to steep there while he talked, and drew it out again by the string when he went away.

The trace of tarnished copper, commonly called verdigris, poisoned the wholesome draught; a minute dose administered by stealth did incalculable mischief. Behold the results of this criminal homoeopathy! On the third day poor Cibot's hair came out, his teeth were loosened in their sockets, his whole system was deranged by a scarcely perceptible trace of poison. Dr. Poulain racked his brains. He was enough of a man of science to see that some destructive agent was at work. He privately carried off the decoction, analyzed it himself, but found nothing. It so chanced that Remonencq had taken fright and omitted to dip the disc in the tumbler that day.

Then Dr. Poulain fell back on himself and science and got out of the difficulty with a theory. A sedentary life in a damp room; a cramped position before the barred window—these conditions had vitiated the blood in the absence of proper exercise, especially as the patient continually breathed an atmosphere saturated with the fetid exhalations of the gutter. The Rue de Normandie is one of the old-fashioned streets that slope towards the middle; the municipal authorities of Paris as yet have laid on no water supply to flush the central kennel which drains the houses on either side, and as a result a stream of filthy ooze meanders among the cobblestones, filters into the soil, and produces the mud peculiar to the city. La Cibot came and went; but her husband, a hard-working man, sat day in day out like a fakir on the table in the window, till his knee-joints were stiffened, the blood stagnated in his body, and his legs grew so thin and crooked that he almost lost the use of them. The deep copper tint of the man's complexion naturally suggested that he had been out of health for a very long time. The wife's good health and the husband's illness seemed to the doctor to be satisfactorily accounted for by this theory.

"Then what is the matter with my poor Cibot?" asked the portress.

"My dear Mme. Cibot, he is dying of the porter's disease," said the doctor. "Incurable vitiation of the blood is evident from the general anaemic condition."

No one had anything to gain by a crime so objectless. Dr. Poulain's first suspicions were effaced by this thought. Who could have any possible interest in Cibot's death? His wife?—the doctor saw her taste the herb-tea as she sweetened it. Crimes which escape social vengeance are many enough, and as a rule they are of this order—to wit, murders committed without any startling sign of violence, without bloodshed, bruises, marks of strangling, without any bungling of the business, in short; if there seems to be no motive for the crime, it most likely goes unpunished, especially if the death occurs among the poorer classes. Murder is almost always denounced by its advanced guards, by hatred or greed well known to those under whose eyes the whole matter has passed. But in the case of the Cibots, no one save the doctor had any interest in discovering the actual cause of death. The little copper-faced tailor's wife adored her husband; he had no money and no enemies; La Cibot's fortune and the marine-store dealer's motives were alike hidden in the shade. Poulain knew the portress and her way of thinking perfectly well; he thought her capable of tormenting Pons, but he saw that she had neither motive enough nor wit enough for murder; and besides—every time the doctor came and she gave her husband a draught, she took a spoonful herself. Poulain himself, the only person who might have thrown light on the matter, inclined to believe that this was one of the unaccountable freaks of disease, one of the astonishing exceptions which make medicine so perilous a profession. And in truth, the little tailor's unwholesome life and unsanitary surroundings had unfortunately brought him to such a pass that the trace of copper-poisoning was like the last straw. Gossips and neighbors took it upon themselves to explain the sudden death, and no suspicion of blame lighted upon Remonencq.

"Oh! this long time past I have said that M. Cibot was not well," cried one.

"He worked too hard, he did," said another; "he heated his blood."

"He would not listen to me," put in a neighbor; "I advised him to walk out of a Sunday and keep Saint Monday; two days in the week is not too much for amusement."

In short, the gossip of the quarter, the tell-tale voice to which Justice, in the person of the commissary of police, the king of the poorer classes, lends an attentive ear—gossip explained the little tailor's demise in a perfectly satisfactory manner. Yet M. Poulain's pensive air and uneasy eyes embarrassed Remonencq not a little, and at sight of the doctor he offered eagerly to go in search of M. Trognon, Fraisier's acquaintance. Fraisier turned to La Cibot to say in a low voice, "I shall come back again as soon as the will is made. In spite of your sorrow, you must look for squalls." Then he slipped away like a shadow and met his friend the doctor.

"Ah, Poulain!" he exclaimed, "it is all right. We are safe! I will tell you about it to-night. Look out a post that will suit you, you shall have it! For my own part, I am a justice of the peace. Tabareau will not refuse me now for a son-in-law. And as for you, I will undertake that you shall marry Mlle. Vitel, granddaughter of our justice of the peace."

Fraisier left Poulain reduced to dumb bewilderment by these wild words; bounced like a ball into the boulevard, hailed an omnibus, and was set down ten minutes later by the modern coach at the corner of the Rue de Choiseul. By this time it was nearly four o'clock. Fraisier felt quite sure of a word in private with the Presidente, for officials seldom leave the Palais de Justice before five o'clock.

Mme. de Marville's reception of him assured Fraisier that M. Leboeuf had kept his promise made to Mme. Vatinelle and spoken favorably of the sometime attorney at Mantes. Amelie's manner was almost caressing. So might the Duchesse de Montpensier have treated Jacques Clement. The petty attorney was a knife to her hand. But when Fraisier produced the joint-letter signed by Elie Magus and Remonencq offering the sum of nine hundred thousand francs in cash for Pons' collection, then the Presidente looked at her man of business and the gleam of the money flashed from her eyes. That ripple of greed reached the attorney.

"M. le President left a message with me," she said; "he hopes that you will dine with us to-morrow. It will be a family party. M. Godeschal, Desroches' successor and my attorney, will come to meet you, and Berthier, our notary, and my daughter and son-in-law. After dinner, you and I and the notary and attorney will have the little consultation for which you ask, and I will give you full powers. The two gentlemen will do as you require and act upon your inspiration; and see that everything goes well. You shall have a power of attorney from M. de Marville as soon as you want it."

"I shall want it on the day of the decease."

"It shall be in readiness."

"Mme. la Presidente, if I ask for a power of attorney, and would prefer that your attorney's name should not appear I wish it less in my own interest than in yours. . . . When I give myself, it is without reserve. And in return, madame, I ask the same fidelity; I ask my patrons (I do not venture to call you my clients) to put the same confidence in me. You may think that in acting thus I am trying to fasten upon this affair—no, no, madame; there may be reprehensible things done; with an inheritance in view one is dragged on . . . especially with nine hundred thousand francs in the balance. Well, now, you could not disavow a man like Maitre Godeschal, honesty itself, but you can throw all the blame on the back of a miserable pettifogging lawyer—"

Mme. Camusot de Marville looked admiringly at Fraisier.

"You ought to go very high," said she, "or sink very low. In your place, instead of asking to hide myself away as a justice of the peace, I would aim at the crown attorney's appointment—at, say, Mantes!—and make a great career for myself."

"Let me have my way, madame. The post of justice of the peace is an ambling pad for M. Vitel; for me it shall be a war-horse."

And in this way the Presidente proceeded to a final confidence.

"You seem to be so completely devoted to our interests," she began, "that I will tell you about the difficulties of our position and our hopes. The President's great desire, ever since a match was projected between his daughter and an adventurer who recently started a bank, —the President's wish, I say, has been to round out the Marville estate with some grazing land, at that time in the market. We dispossessed ourselves of fine property, as you know, to settle it upon our daughter; but I wish very much, my daughter being an only child, to buy all that remains of the grass land. Part has been sold already. The estate belongs to an Englishman who is returning to England after a twenty years' residence in France. He built the most charming cottage in a delightful situation, between Marville Park and the meadows which once were part of the Marville lands; he bought up covers, copse, and gardens at fancy prices to make the grounds about the cottage. The house and its surroundings make a feature of the landscape, and it lies close to my daughter's park palings. The whole, land and house, should be bought for seven hundred thousand francs, for the net revenue is about twenty thousand francs. . . . But if Mr. Wadman finds out that we think of buying it, he is sure to add another two or three hundred thousand francs to the price; for he will lose money if the house counts for nothing, as it usually does when you buy land in the country—"

"Why, madame," Fraisier broke in, "in my opinion you can be so sure that the inheritance is yours that I will offer to act the part of purchaser for you. I will undertake that you shall have the land at the best possible price, and have a written engagement made out under private seal, like a contract to deliver goods. . . . I will go to the Englishman in the character of buyer. I understand that sort of thing; it was my specialty at Mantes. Vatinelle doubled the value of his practice, while I worked in his name."

"Hence your connection with little Madame Vatinelle. He must be very well off—"

"But Mme. Vatinelle has expensive tastes. . . . So be easy, madame—I will serve you up the Englishman done to a turn—"

"If you can manage that you will have eternal claims to my gratitude. Good-day, my dear M. Fraisier. Till to-morrow—"

Fraisier went. His parting bow was a degree less cringing than on the first occasion.

"I am to dine to-morrow with President de Marville!" he said to himself. "Come now, I have these folk in my power. Only, to be absolute master, I ought to be the German's legal adviser in the person of Tabareau, the justice's clerk. Tabareau will not have me now for his daughter, his only daughter, but he will give her to me when I am a justice of the peace. I shall be eligible. Mlle. Tabareau, that tall, consumptive girl with the red hair, has a house in the Place Royale in right of her mother. At her father's death she is sure to come in for six thousand francs, you must not look too hard at the plank."

As he went back to the Rue de Normandie by way of the boulevards, he dreamed out his golden dream, he gave himself up to the happiness of the thought that he should never know want again. He would marry his friend Poulain to Mlle. Vitel, the daughter of the justice of the peace; together, he and his friend the doctor would reign like kings in the quarter; he would carry all the elections—municipal, military, or political. The boulevards seem short if, while you pace afoot, you mount your ambition on the steed of fancy in this way.

Schmucke meanwhile went back to his friend Pons with the news that Cibot was dying, and Remonencq gone in search of M. Trognon, the notary. Pons was struck by the name. It had come up again and again in La Cibot's interminable talk, and La Cibot always recommended him as honesty incarnate. And with that a luminous idea occurred to Pons, in whom mistrust had grown paramount since the morning, an idea which completed his plan for outwitting La Cibot and unmasking her completely for the too-credulous Schmucke.

So many unexpected things had happened that day that poor Schmucke was quite bewildered. Pons took his friend's hand.

"There must be a good deal of confusion in the house, Schmucke; if the porter is at death's door, we are almost free for a minute or two; that is to say, there will be no spies—for we are watched, you may be sure of that. Go out, take a cab, go to the theatre, and tell Mlle. Heloise Brisetout that I should like to see her before I die. Ask her to come here to-night when she leaves the theatre. Then go to your friends Brunner and Schwab and beg them to come to-morrow morning at nine o'clock to inquire after me; let them come up as if they were just passing by and called in to see me."

The old artist felt that he was dying, and this was the scheme that he forged. He meant Schmucke to be his universal legatee. To protect Schmucke from any possible legal quibbles, he proposed to dictate his will to a notary in the presence of witnesses, lest his sanity should be called in question and the Camusots should attempt upon that pretext to dispute the will. At the name of Trognon he caught a glimpse of machinations of some kind; perhaps a flaw purposely inserted, or premeditated treachery on La Cibot's part. He would prevent this. Trognon should dictate a holograph will which should be signed and deposited in a sealed envelope in a drawer. Then Schmucke, hidden in one of the cabinets in his alcove, should see La Cibot search for the will, find it, open the envelope, read it through, and seal it again. Next morning, at nine o'clock, he would cancel the will and make a new one in the presence of two notaries, everything in due form and order. La Cibot had treated him as a madman and a visionary; he saw what this meant—he saw the Presidente's hate and greed, her revenge in La Cibot's behavior. In the sleepless hours and lonely days of the last two months, the poor man had sifted the events of his past life.

It has been the wont of sculptors, ancient and modern, to set a tutelary genius with a lighted torch upon either side of a tomb. Those torches that light up the paths of death throw light for dying eyes upon the spectacle of a life's mistakes and sins; the carved stone figures express great ideas, they are symbols of a fact in human experience. The agony of death has its own wisdom. Not seldom a simple girl, scarcely more than a child, will grow wise with the experience of a hundred years, will gain prophetic vision, judge her family, and see clearly through all pretences, at the near approach of Death. Herein lies Death's poetry. But, strange and worthy of remark it is, there are two manners of death.

The poetry of prophecy, the gift of seeing clearly into the future or the past, only belongs to those whose bodies are stricken, to those who die by the destruction of the organs of physical life. Consumptive patients, for instance, or those who die of gangrene like Louis XIV., of fever like Pons, of a stomach complaint like Mme. de Mortsauf, or of wounds received in the full tide of life like soldiers on the battlefield—all these may possess this supreme lucidity to the full; their deaths fill us with surprise and wonder. But many, on the other hand, die of intelligential diseases, as they may be called; of maladies seated in the brain or in that nervous system which acts as a kind of purveyor of thought fuel—and these die wholly, body and spirit are darkened together. The former are spirits deserted by the body, realizing for us our ideas of the spirits of Scripture; the latter are bodies untenanted by a spirit.

Too late the virgin nature, the epicure-Cato, the righteous man almost without sin, was discovering the Presidente's real character—the sac of gall that did duty for her heart. He knew the world now that he was about to leave it, and for the past few hours he had risen gaily to his part, like a joyous artist finding a pretext for caricature and laughter in everything. The last links that bound him to life, the chains of admiration, the strong ties that bind the art lover to Art's masterpieces, had been snapped that morning. When Pons knew that La Cibot had robbed him, he bade farewell, like a Christian, to the pomps and vanities of Art, to his collection, to all his old friendships with the makers of so many fair things. Our forefathers counted the day of death as a Christian festival, and in something of the same spirit Pons' thoughts turned to the coming end. In his tender love he tried to protect Schmucke when he should be low in the grave. It was this father's thought that led him to fix his choice upon the leading lady of the ballet. Mlle. Brisetout should help him to baffle surrounding treachery, and those who in all probability would never forgive his innocent universal legatee.

Heloise Brisetout was one of the few natures that remain true in a false position. She was an opera-girl of the school of Josepha and Jenny Cadine, capable of playing any trick on a paying adorer; yet she was a good comrade, dreading no power on earth, accustomed as she was to see the weak side of the strong and to hold her own with the police at the scarcely idyllic Bal de Mabille and the carnival.

"If she asked for my place for Garangeot, she will think that she owes me a good turn by so much the more," said Pons to himself.

Thanks to the prevailing confusion in the porter's lodge, Schmucke succeeded in getting out of the house. He returned with the utmost speed, fearing to leave Pons too long alone. M. Trognon reached the house just as Schmucke came in. Albeit Cibot was dying, his wife came upstairs with the notary, brought him into the bedroom, and withdrew, leaving Schmucke and Pons with M. Trognon; but she left the door ajar, and went no further than the next room. Providing herself with a little hand-glass of curious workmanship, she took up her station in the doorway, so that she could not only hear but see all that passed at the supreme moment.

"Sir," said Pons, "I am in the full possession of my faculties, unfortunately for me, for I feel that I am about to die; and doubtless, by the will of God, I shall be spared nothing of the agony of death. This is M. Schmucke"—(the notary bowed to M. Schmucke)—"my one friend on earth," continued Pons. "I wish to make him my universal legatee. Now, tell me how to word the will, so that my friend, who is a German and knows nothing of French law, may succeed to my possessions without any dispute."

"Anything is liable to be disputed, sir," said the notary; "that is the drawback of human justice. But in the matter of wills, there are wills so drafted that they cannot be upset—"

"In what way?" queried Pons.

"If a will is made in the presence of a notary, and before witnesses who can swear that the testator was in the full possession of his faculties; and if the testator has neither wife nor children, nor father nor mother—"

"I have none of these; all my affection is centred upon my dear friend Schmucke here."

The tears overflowed Schmucke's eyes.

"Then, if you have none but distant relatives, the law leaves you free to dispose of both personalty and real estate as you please, so long as you bequeath them for no unlawful purpose; for you must have come across cases of wills disputed on account of the testator's eccentricities. A will made in the presence of a notary is considered to be authentic; for the person's identity is established, the notary certifies that the testator was sane at the time, and there can be no possible dispute over the signature.—Still, a holograph will, properly and clearly worded, is quite as safe."

"I have decided, for reasons of my own, to make a holograph will at your dictation, and to deposit it with my friend here. Is this possible?"

"Quite possible," said the notary. "Will you write? I will begin to dictate—"

"Schmucke, bring me my little Boule writing-desk.—Speak low, sir," he added; "we may be overheard."

"Just tell me, first of all, what you intend," demanded the notary.

Ten minutes later La Cibot saw the notary look over the will, while Schmucke lighted a taper (Pons watching her reflection all the while in a mirror). She saw the envelope sealed, saw Pons give it to Schmucke, and heard him say that it must be put away in a secret drawer in his bureau. Then the testator asked for the key, tied it to the corner of his handkerchief, and slipped it under his pillow.

The notary himself, by courtesy, was appointed executor. To him Pons left a picture of price, such a thing as the law permits a notary to receive. Trognon went out and came upon Mme. Cibot in the salon.

"Well, sir, did M. Pons remember me?"

"You do not expect a notary to betray secrets confided to him, my dear," returned M. Trognon. "I can only tell you this—there will be many disappointments, and some that are anxious after the money will be foiled. M. Pons has made a good and very sensible will, a patriotic will, which I highly approve."

La Cibot's curiosity, kindled by such words, reached an unimaginable pitch. She went downstairs and spent the night at Cibot's bedside, inwardly resolving that Mlle. Remonencq should take her place towards two or three in the morning, when she would go up and have a look at the document.

Mlle. Brisetout's visit towards half-past ten that night seemed natural enough to La Cibot; but in her terror lest the ballet-girl should mention Gaudissart's gift of a thousand francs, she went upstairs with her, lavishing polite speeches and flattery as if Mlle. Heloise had been a queen.

"Ah! my dear, you are much nicer here on your own ground than at the theatre," Heloise remarked. "I advise you to keep to your employment."

Heloise was splendidly dressed. Bixiou, her lover, had brought her in his carriage on the way to an evening party at Mariette's. It so fell out that the first-floor lodger, M. Chapoulot, a retired braid manufacturer from the Rue Saint-Denis, returning from the Ambigu-Comique with his wife and daughter, was dazzled by a vision of such a costume and such a charming woman upon their staircase.

"Who is that, Mme. Cibot?" asked Mme. Chapoulot.

"A no-better-than-she-should-be, a light-skirts that you may see half-naked any evening for a couple of francs," La Cibot answered in an undertone for Mme. Chapoulot's ear.

"Victorine!" called the braid manufacturer's wife, "let the lady pass, child."

The matron's alarm signal was not lost upon Heloise.

"Your daughter must be more inflammable than tinder, madame, if you are afraid that she will catch fire by touching me," she said.

M. Chapoulot waited on the landing. "She is uncommonly handsome off the stage," he remarked. Whereupon Mme. Chapoulot pinched him sharply and drove him indoors.

"Here is a second-floor lodger that has a mind to set up for being on the fourth floor," said Heloise as she continued to climb.

"But mademoiselle is accustomed to going higher and higher."

"Well, old boy," said Heloise, entering the bedroom and catching sight of the old musician's white, wasted face. "Well, old boy, so we are not very well? Everybody at the theatre is asking after you; but though one's heart may be in the right place, every one has his own affairs, you know, and cannot find time to go to see friends. Gaudissart talks of coming round every day, and every morning the tiresome management gets hold of him. Still, we are all of us fond of you—"

"Mme. Cibot," said the patient, "be so kind as to leave us; we want to talk about the theatre and my post as conductor, with this lady. Schmucke, will you go to the door with Mme. Cibot?"

At a sign from Pons, Schmucke saw Mme. Cibot out at the door, and drew the bolts.

"Ah, that blackguard of a German! Is he spoiled, too?" La Cibot said to herself as she heard the significant sounds. "That is M. Pons' doing; he taught him those disgusting tricks. . . . But you shall pay for this, my dears," she thought as she went down stairs. "Pooh! if that tight-rope dancer tells him about the thousand francs, I shall say that it is a farce.

She seated herself by Cibot's pillow. Cibot complained of a burning sensation in the stomach. Remonencq had called in and given him a draught while his wife was upstairs.

As soon as Schmucke had dismissed La Cibot, Pons turned to the ballet-girl.

"Dear child, I can trust no one else to find me a notary, an honest man, and send him here to make my will to-morrow morning at half-past nine precisely. I want to leave all that I have to Schmucke. If he is persecuted, poor German that he is, I shall reckon upon the notary; the notary must defend him. And for that reason I must have a wealthy notary, highly thought of, a man above the temptations to which pettifogging lawyers yield. He must succor my poor friend. I cannot trust Berthier, Cardot's successor. And you know so many people—"

"Oh! I have the very man for you," Heloise broke in; "there is the notary that acts for Florine and the Comtesse du Bruel, Leopold Hannequin, a virtuous man that does not know what a lorette is! He is a sort of chance-come father—a good soul that will not let you play ducks and drakes with your earnings; I call him Le Pere aux Rats, because he instils economical notions into the minds of all my friends. In the first place, my dear fellow, he has a private income of sixty thousand francs; and he is a notary of the real old sort, a notary while he walks or sleeps; his children must be little notaries and notaresses. He is a heavy, pedantic creature, and that's the truth; but on his own ground, he is not the man to flinch before any power in creation. . . . No woman ever got money out of him; he is a fossil pater-familias, his wife worships him, and does not deceive him, although she is a notary's wife.—What more do you want? as a notary he has not his match in Paris. He is in the patriarchal style; not queer and amusing, as Cardot used to be with Malaga; but he will never decamp like little What's-his-name that lived with Antonia. So I will send round my man to-morrow morning at eight o'clock. . . . You may sleep in peace. And I hope, in the first place, that you will get better, and make charming music for us again; and yet, after all, you see, life is very dreary—managers chisel you, and kings mizzle and ministers fizzle and rich fold economizzle.—Artists have nothing left here" (tapping her breast)—"it is a time to die in. Good-bye, old boy."

"Heloise, of all things, I ask you to keep my counsel."

"It is not a theatre affair," she said; "it is sacred for an artist."

"Who is your gentleman, child?"

"M. Baudoyer, the mayor of your arrondissement, a man as stupid as the late Crevel; Crevel once financed Gaudissart, you know, and a few days ago he died and left me nothing, not so much as a pot of pomatum. That made me say just now that this age of ours is something sickening."

"What did he die of?"

"Of his wife. If he had stayed with me, he would be living now. Good-bye, dear old boy, I am talking of going off, because I can see that you will be walking about the boulevards in a week or two, hunting up pretty little curiosities again. You are not ill; I never saw your eyes look so bright." And she went, fully convinced that her protege Garangeot would conduct the orchestra for good.

Every door stood ajar as she went downstairs. Every lodger, on tip-toe, watched the lady of the ballet pass on her way out. It was quite an event in the house.

Fraisier, like the bulldog that sets his teeth and never lets go, was on the spot. He stood beside La Cibot when Mlle. Brisetout passed under the gateway and asked for the door to be opened. Knowing that a will had been made, he had come to see how the land lay, for Maitre Trognon, notary, had refused to say a syllable—Fraisier's questions were as fruitless as Mme. Cibot's. Naturally the ballet-girl's visit in extremis was not lost upon Fraisier; he vowed to himself that he would turn it to good account.

"My dear Mme. Cibot," he began, "now is the critical moment for you."

"Ah, yes . . . my poor Cibot!" said she. "When I think that he will not live to enjoy anything I may get—"

"It is a question of finding out whether M. Pons has left you anything at all; whether your name is mentioned or left out, in fact," he interrupted. "I represent the next-of-kin, and to them you must look in any case. It is a holograph will, and consequently very easy to upset.—Do you know where our man has put it?"

"In a secret drawer in his bureau, and he has the key of it. He tied it to a corner of his handkerchief, and put it under his pillow. I saw it all."

"Is the will sealed?"

"Yes, alas!"

"It is a criminal offence if you carry off a will and suppress it, but it is only a misdemeanor to look at it; and anyhow, what does it amount to? A peccadillo, and nobody will see you. Is your man a heavy sleeper?"

"Yes. But when you tried to see all the things and value them, he ought to have slept like a top, and yet he woke up. Still, I will see about it. I will take M. Schmucke's place about four o'clock this morning; and if you care to come, you shall have the will in your hands for ten minutes."

"Good. I will come up about four o'clock, and I will knock very softly—"

"Mlle Remonencq will take my place with Cibot. She will know, and open the door; but tap on the window, so as to rouse nobody in the house."

"Right," said Fraisier. "You will have a light, will you not. A candle will do."



At midnight poor Schmucke sat in his easy-chair, watching with a breaking heart that shrinking of the features that comes with death; Pons looked so worn out with the day's exertions, that death seemed very near.

Presently Pons spoke. "I have just enough strength, I think, to last till to-morrow night," he said philosophically. "To-morrow night the death agony will begin; poor Schmucke! As soon as the notary and your two friends are gone, go for our good Abbe Duplanty, the curate of Saint-Francois. Good man, he does not know that I am ill, and I wish to take the holy sacrament to-morrow at noon."

There was a long pause.

"God so willed it that life has not been as I dreamed," Pons resumed. "I should so have loved wife and children and home. . . . To be loved by a very few in some corner—that was my whole ambition! Life is hard for every one; I have seen people who had all that I wanted so much and could not have, and yet they were not happy. . . . Then at the end of my life, God put untold comfort in my way, when He gave me such a friend. . . . And one thing I have not to reproach myself with—that I have not known your worth nor appreciated you, my good Schmucke. . . . I have loved you with my whole heart, with all the strength of love that is in me. . . . Do not cry, Schmucke; I shall say no more if you cry and it is so sweet to me to talk of ourselves to you. . . . If I had listened to you, I should not be dying. I should have left the world and broken off my habits, and then I should not have been wounded to death. And now, I want to think of no one but you at the last—"

"You are missdaken—"

"Do not contradict me—listen, dear friend. . . . You are as guileless and simple as a six-year-old child that has never left its mother; one honors you for it—it seems to me that God Himself must watch over such as you. But men are so wicked, that I ought to warn you beforehand . . . and then you will lose your generous trust, your saint-like belief in others, the bloom of a purity of soul that only belongs to genius or to hearts like yours. . . . In a little while you will see Mme. Cibot, who left the door ajar and watched us closely while M. Trognon was here—in a little while you will see her come for the will, as she believes it to be. . . . I expect the worthless creature will do her business this morning when she thinks you are asleep. Now, mind what I say, and carry out my instructions to the letter. . . . Are you listening?" asked the dying man.

But Schmucke was overcome with grief, his heart was throbbing painfully, his head fell back on the chair, he seemed to have lost consciousness.

"Yes," he answered, "I can hear, but it is as if you vere doo huntert baces afay from me. . . . It seem to me dat I am going town into der grafe mit you," said Schmucke, crushed with pain.