The wooden palings of the garden were examined; none were broken. The garden paths showed no trace of footsteps. The magistrate thought it probable that the robber had walked on the grass to leave no foot-prints if he had come that way; but how could he have got into the house? The back door to the garden had an outer guard of three iron bars, uninjured; and there, too, the key was in the lock inside, as in the front door.

All these impossibilities having been duly noted by Monsieur Popinot, by Bibi-Lupin, who stayed there a day to examine every detail, by the public prosecutor himself, and by the sergeant of the gendarmerie at Nanterre, this murder became an agitating mystery, in which the Law and the Police were nonplussed.

This drama, published in the Gazette des Tribunaux, took place in the winter of 1828-29. God alone knows what excitement this puzzling crime occasioned in Paris! But Paris has a new drama to watch every morning, and forgets everything. The police, on the contrary, forgets nothing.

Three months after this fruitless inquiry, a girl of the town, whose extravagance had invited the attention of Bibi-Lupin's agents, who watched her as being the ally of several thieves, tried to persuade a woman she knew to pledge twelve silver spoons and forks and a gold watch and chain. The friend refused. This came to Bibi-Lupin's ears, and he remembered the plate and the watch and chain stolen at Nanterre. The commissioners of the Mont-de-Piete, and all the receivers of stolen goods, were warned, while Manon la Blonde was subjected to unremitting scrutiny.

It was very soon discovered that Manon la Blonde was madly in love with a young man who was never to be seen, and was supposed to be deaf to all the fair Manon's proofs of devotion. Mystery on mystery. However, this youth, under the diligent attentions of police spies, was soon seen and identified as an escaped convict, the famous hero of the Corsican vendetta, the handsome Theodore Calvi, known as Madeleine.

A man was turned on to entrap Calvi, one of those double-dealing buyers of stolen goods who serve the thieves and the police both at once; he promised to purchase the silver and the watch and chain. At the moment when the dealer of the Cour Saint-Guillaume was counting out the cash to Theodore, dressed as a woman, at half-past six in the evening, the police came in and seized Theodore and the property.

The inquiry was at once begun. On such thin evidence it was impossible to pass a sentence of death. Calvi never swerved, he never contradicted himself. He said that a country woman had sold him these objects at Argenteuil; that after buying them, the excitement over the murder committed at Nanterre had shown him the danger of keeping this plate and watch and chain in his possession, since, in fact, they were proved by the inventory made after the death of the wine merchant, the widow Pigeau's uncle, to be those that were stolen from her. Compelled at last by poverty to sell them, he said he wished to dispose of them by the intervention of a person to whom no suspicion could attach.

And nothing else could be extracted from the convict, who, by his taciturnity and firmness, contrived to insinuate that the wine-merchant at Nanterre had committed the crime, and that the woman of whom he, Theodore, had bought them was the wine-merchant's wife. The unhappy man and his wife were both taken into custody; but, after a week's imprisonment, it was amply proved that neither the husband nor the wife had been out of their house at the time. Also, Calvi failed to recognize in the wife the woman who, as he declared, had sold him the things.

As it was shown that Calvi's mistress, implicated in the case, had spent about a thousand francs since the date of the crime and the day when Calvi tried to pledge the plate and trinkets, the evidence seemed strong enough to commit Calvi and the girl for trial. This murder being the eighteenth which Theodore had committed, he was condemned to death for he seemed certainly to be guilty of this skilfully contrived crime. Though he did not recognize the wine-merchant's wife, both she and her husband recognized him. The inquiry had proved, by the evidence of several witnesses, that Theodore had been living at Nanterre for about a month; he had worked at a mason's, his face whitened with plaster, and his clothes very shabby. At Nanterre the lad was supposed to be about eighteen years old, for the whole month he must have been nursing that brat (nourri ce poupon, i.e. hatching the crime).

The lawyers thought he must have had accomplices. The chimney-pots were measured and compared with the size of Manon la Blonde's body to see if she could have got in that way; but a child of six could not have passed up or down those red-clay pipes, which, in modern buildings, take the place of the vast chimneys of old-fashioned houses. But for this singular and annoying difficulty, Theodore would have been executed within a week. The prison chaplain, it has been seen, could make nothing of him.



All this business, and the name of Calvi, must have escaped the notice of Jacques Collin, who, at the time, was absorbed in his single-handed struggle with Contenson, Corentin, and Peyrade. It had indeed been a point with Trompe-la-Mort to forget as far as possible his chums and all that had to do with the law courts; he dreaded a meeting which should bring him face to face with a pal who might demand an account of his boss which Collin could not possibly render.

The governor of the prison went forthwith to the public prosecutor's court, where he found the Attorney-General in conversation with Monsieur de Granville, who had spent the whole night at the Hotel de Serizy, was, in consequence of this important case, obliged to give a few hours to his duties, though overwhelmed with fatigue and grief; for the physicians could not yet promise that the Countess would recover her sanity.

After speaking a few words to the governor, Monsieur de Granville took the warrant from the attorney and placed it in Gault's hands.

"Let the matter proceed," said he, "unless some extraordinary circumstances should arise. Of this you must judge. I trust to your judgment. The scaffold need not be erected till half-past ten, so you still have an hour. On such an occasion hours are centuries, and many things may happen in a century. Do not allow him to think he is reprieved; prepare the man for execution if necessary; and if nothing comes of that, give Sanson the warrant at half-past nine. Let him wait!"

As the governor of the prison left the public prosecutor's room, under the archway of the passage into the hall he met Monsieur Camusot, who was going there. He exchanged a few hurried words with the examining judge; and after telling him what had been done at the Conciergerie with regard to Jacques Collin, he went on to witness the meeting of Trompe-la-Mort and Madeleine; and he did not allow the so-called priest to see the condemned criminal till Bibi-Lupin, admirably disguised as a gendarme, had taken the place of the prisoner left in charge of the young Corsican.

No words can describe the amazement of the three convicts when a warder came to fetch Jacques Collin and led him to the condemned cell! With one consent they rushed up to the chair on which Jacques Collin was sitting.

"To-day, isn't it, monsieur?" asked Fil-de-Soie of the warder.

"Yes, Jack Ketch is waiting," said the man with perfect indifference.

Charlot is the name by which the executioner is known to the populace and the prison world in Paris. The nickname dates from the Revolution of 1789.

The words produced a great sensation. The prisoners looked at each other.

"It is all over with him," the warder went on; "the warrant has been delivered to Monsieur Gault, and the sentence has just been read to him."

"And so the fair Madeleine has received the last sacraments?" said la Pouraille, and he swallowed a deep mouthful of air.

"Poor little Theodore!" cried le Biffon; "he is a pretty chap too. What a pity to drop your nut" (eternuer dans le son) "so young."

The warder went towards the gate, thinking that Jacques Collin was at his heels. But the Spaniard walked very slowly, and when he was getting near to Julien he tottered and signed to la Pouraille to give him his arm.

"He is a murderer," said Napolitas to the priest, pointing to la Pouraille, and offering his own arm.

"No, to me he is an unhappy wretch!" replied Jacques Collin, with the presence of mind and the unction of the Archbishop of Cambrai. And he drew away from Napolitas, of whom he had been very suspicious from the first. Then he said to his pals in an undertone:

"He is on the bottom step of the Abbaye de Monte-a-Regret, but I am the Prior! I will show you how well I know how to come round the beaks. I mean to snatch this boy's nut from their jaws."

"For the sake of his breeches!" said Fil-de-Soie with a smile.

"I mean to win his soul to heaven!" replied Jacques Collin fervently, seeing some other prisoners about him. And he joined the warder at the gate.

"He got in to save Madeleine," said Fil-de-Soie. "We guessed rightly. What a boss he is!"

"But how can he? Jack Ketch's men are waiting. He will not even see the kid," objected le Biffon.

"The devil is on his side!" cried la Pouraille. "He claim our blunt! Never! He is too fond of his old chums! We are too useful to him! They wanted to make us blow the gaff, but we are not such flats! If he saves his Madeleine, I will tell him all my secrets."

The effect of this speech was to increase the devotion of the three convicts to their boss; for at this moment he was all their hope.

Jacques Collin, in spite of Madeleine's peril, did not forget to play his part. Though he knew the Conciergerie as well as he knew the hulks in the three ports, he blundered so naturally that the warder had to tell him, "This way, that way," till they reached the office. There, at a glance, Jacques Collin recognized a tall, stout man leaning on the stove, with a long, red face not without distinction: it was Sanson.

"Monsieur is the chaplain?" said he, going towards him with simple cordiality.

The mistake was so shocking that it froze the bystanders.

"No, monsieur," said Sanson; "I have other functions."

Sanson, the father of the last executioner of that name—for he has recently been dismissed—was the son of the man who beheaded Louis XVI. After four centuries of hereditary office, this descendant of so many executioners had tried to repudiate the traditional burden. The Sansons were for two hundred years executioners at Rouen before being promoted to the first rank in the kingdom, and had carried out the decrees of justice from father to son since the thirteenth century. Few families can boast of an office or of nobility handed down in a direct line during six centuries.

This young man had been captain in a cavalry regiment, and was looking forward to a brilliant military career, when his father insisted on his help in decapitating the king. Then he made his son his deputy when, in 1793, two guillotines were in constant work—one at the Barriere du Trone, and the other in the Place de Greve. This terrible functionary, now a man of about sixty, was remarkable for his dignified air, his gentle and deliberate manners, and his entire contempt for Bibi-Lupin and his acolytes who fed the machine. The only detail which betrayed the blood of the mediaeval executioner was the formidable breadth and thickness of his hands. Well informed too, caring greatly for his position as a citizen and an elector, and an enthusiastic florist, this tall, brawny man with his low voice, his calm reserve, his few words, and a high bald forehead, was like an English nobleman rather than an executioner. And a Spanish priest would certainly have fallen into the mistake which Jacques Collin had intentionally made.

"He is no convict!" said the head warder to the governor.

"I begin to think so too," replied Monsieur Gault, with a nod to that official.

Jacques Collin was led to the cellar-like room where Theodore Calvi, in a straitwaistcoat, was sitting on the edge of the wretched camp bed. Trompe-la-Mort, under a transient gleam of light from the passage, at once recognized Bibi-Lupin in the gendarme who stood leaning on his sword.

"Io sono Gaba-Morto. Parla nostro Italiano," said Jacques Collin very rapidly. "Vengo ti salvar."

"I am Trompe-la-Mort. Talk our Italian. I have come to save you."

All the two chums wanted to say had, of course, to be incomprehensible to the pretended gendarme; and as Bibi-Lupin was left in charge of the prisoner, he could not leave his post. The man's fury was quite indescribable.

Theodore Calvi, a young man with a pale olive complexion, light hair, and hollow, dull, blue eyes, well built, hiding prodigious strength under the lymphatic appearance that is not uncommon in Southerners, would have had a charming face but for the strongly-arched eyebrows and low forehead that gave him a sinister expression, scarlet lips of savage cruelty, and a twitching of the muscles peculiar to Corsicans, denoting that excessive irritability which makes them so prompt to kill in any sudden squabble.

Theodore, startled at the sound of that voice, raised his head, and at first thought himself the victim of a delusion; but as the experience of two months had accustomed him to the darkness of this stone box, he looked at the sham priest, and sighed deeply. He did not recognize Jacques Collin, whose face, scarred by the application of sulphuric acid, was not that of his old boss.

"It is really your Jacques; I am your confessor, and have come to get you off. Do not be such a ninny as to know me; and speak as if you were making a confession." He spoke with the utmost rapidity. "This young fellow is very much depressed; he is afraid to die, he will confess everything," said Jacques Collin, addressing the gendarme.

Bibi-Lupin dared not say a word for fear of being recognized.

"Say something to show me that you are he; you have nothing but his voice," said Theodore.

"You see, poor boy, he assures me that he is innocent," said Jacques Collin to Bibi-Lupin, who dared not speak for fear of being recognized.

"Sempre mi," said Jacques, returning close to Theodore, and speaking the word in his ear.

"Sempre ti," replied Theodore, giving the countersign. "Yes, you are the boss——"

"Did you do the trick?"

"Yes."

"Tell me the whole story, that I may see what can be done to save you; make haste, Jack Ketch is waiting."

The Corsican at once knelt down and pretended to be about to confess.

Bibi-Lupin did not know what to do, for the conversation was so rapid that it hardly took as much time as it does to read it. Theodore hastily told all the details of the crime, of which Jacques Collin knew nothing.

"The jury gave their verdict without proof," he said finally.

"Child! you want to argue when they are waiting to cut off your hair——"

"But I might have been sent to spout the wedge.—And that is the way they judge you!—and in Paris too!"

"But how did you do the job?" asked Trompe-la-Mort.

"Ah! there you are.—Since I saw you I made acquaintance with a girl, a Corsican, I met when I came to Paris."

"Men who are such fools as to love a woman," cried Jacques Collin, "always come to grief that way. They are tigers on the loose, tigers who blab and look at themselves in the glass.—You were a gaby."

"But——"

"Well, what good did she do you—that curse of a moll?"

"That duck of a girl—no taller than a bundle of firewood, as slippery as an eel, and as nimble as a monkey—got in at the top of the oven, and opened the front door. The dogs were well crammed with balls, and as dead as herrings. I settled the two women. Then when I got the swag, Ginetta locked the door and got out again by the oven."

"Such a clever dodge deserves life," said Jacques Collin, admiring the execution of the crime as a sculptor admires the modeling of a figure.

"And I was fool enough to waste all that cleverness for a thousand crowns!"

"No, for a woman," replied Jacques Collin. "I tell you, they deprive us of all our wits," and Jacques Collin eyed Theodore with a flashing glance of contempt.

"But you were not there!" said the Corsican; "I was all alone——"

"And do you love the slut?" asked Jacques Collin, feeling that the reproach was a just one.

"Oh! I want to live, but it is for you now rather than for her."

"Be quite easy, I am not called Trompe-la-Mort for nothing. I undertake the case."

"What! life?" cried the lad, lifting his swaddled hands towards the damp vault of the cell.

"My little Madeleine, prepare to be lagged for life (penal servitude)," replied Jacques Collin. "You can expect no less; they won't crown you with roses like a fatted ox. When they first set us down for Rochefort, it was because they wanted to be rid of us! But if I can get you ticketed for Toulon, you can get out and come back to Pantin (Paris), where I will find you a tidy way of living."

A sigh such as had rarely been heard under that inexorable roof struck the stones, which sent back the sound that has no fellow in music, to the ear of the astounded Bibi-Lupin.

"It is the effect of the absolution I promised him in return for his revelations," said Jacques Collin to the gendarme. "These Corsicans, monsieur, are full of faith! But he is as innocent as the Immaculate Babe, and I mean to try to save him."

"God bless you, Monsieur l'Abbe!" said Theodore in French.



Trompe-la-Mort, more Carlos Herrera, more the canon than ever, left the condemned cell, rushed back to the hall, and appeared before Monsieur Gault in affected horror.

"Indeed, sir, the young man is innocent; he has told me who the guilty person is! He was ready to die for a false point of honor—he is a Corsican! Go and beg the public prosecutor to grant me five minutes' interview. Monsieur de Granville cannot refuse to listen at once to a Spanish priest who is suffering so cruelly from the blunders of the French police."

"I will go," said Monsieur Gault, to the extreme astonishment of all the witnesses of this extraordinary scene.

"And meanwhile," said Jacques, "send me back to the prison-yard where I may finish the conversion of a criminal whose heart I have touched already—they have hearts, these people!"

This speech produced a sensation in all who heard it. The gendarmes, the registry clerk, Sanson, the warders, the executioner's assistant—all awaiting orders to go and get the scaffold ready—to rig up the machine, in prison slang—all these people, usually so indifferent, were agitated by very natural curiosity.

Just then the rattle of a carriage with high-stepping horses was heard; it stopped very suggestively at the gate of the Conciergerie on the quay. The door was opened, and the step let down in such haste, that every one supposed that some great personage had arrived. Presently a lady waving a sheet of blue paper came forward to the outer gate of the prison, followed by a footman and a chasseur. Dressed very handsomely, and all in black, with a veil over her bonnet, she was wiping her eyes with a floridly embroidered handkerchief.

Jacques Collin at once recognized Asie, or, to give the woman her true name, Jacqueline Collin, his aunt. This horrible old woman—worthy of her nephew—whose thoughts were all centered in the prisoner, and who was defending him with intelligence and mother-wit that were a match for the powers of the law, had a permit made out the evening before in the name of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse's waiting-maid by the request of Monsieur de Serizy, allowing her to see Lucien de Rubempre, and the Abbe Carlos Herrera so soon as he should be brought out of the secret cells. On this the Colonel, who was the Governor-in-Chief of all the prisons had written a few words, and the mere color of the paper revealed powerful influences; for these permits, like theatre-tickets, differ in shape and appearance.

So the turnkey hastened to open the gate, especially when he saw the chasseur with his plumes and an uniform of green and gold as dazzling as a Russian General's, proclaiming a lady of aristocratic rank and almost royal birth.

"Oh, my dear Abbe!" exclaimed this fine lady, shedding a torrent of tears at the sight of the priest, "how could any one ever think of putting such a saintly man in here, even by mistake?"

The Governor took the permit and read, "Introduced by His Excellency the Comte de Serizy."

"Ah! Madame de San-Esteban, Madame la Marquise," cried Carlos Herrera, "what admirable devotion!"

"But, madame, such interviews are against the rules," said the good old Governor. And he intercepted the advance of this bale of black watered-silk and lace.

"But at such a distance!" said Jacques Collin, "and in your presence——" and he looked round at the group.

His aunt, whose dress might well dazzle the clerk, the Governor, the warders, and the gendarmes, stank of musk. She had on, besides a thousand crowns of lace, a black India cashmere shawl, worth six thousand francs. And her chasseur was marching up and down outside with the insolence of a lackey who knows that he is essential to an exacting princess. He spoke never a word to the footman, who stood by the gate on the quay, which is always open by day.

"What do you wish? What can I do?" said Madame de San-Esteban in the lingo agreed upon by this aunt and nephew.

This dialect consisted in adding terminations in ar or in or, or in al or in i to every word, whether French or slang, so as to disguise it by lengthening it. It was a diplomatic cipher adapted to speech.

"Put all the letters in some safe place; take out those that are most likely to compromise the ladies; come back, dressed very poorly, to the Salle des Pas-Perdus, and wait for my orders."

Asie, otherwise Jacqueline, knelt as if to receive his blessing, and the sham priest blessed his aunt with evengelical unction.

"Addio, Marchesa," said he aloud. "And," he added in their private language, "find Europe and Paccard with the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs they bagged. We must have them."

"Paccard is out there," said the pious Marquise, pointing to the chasseur, her eyes full of tears.

This intuitive comprehension brought not merely a smile to the man's lips, but a gesture of surprise; no one could astonish him but his aunt. The sham Marquise turned to the bystanders with the air of a woman accustomed to give herself airs.

"He is in despair at being unable to attend his son's funeral," said she in broken French, "for this monstrous miscarriage of justice has betrayed the saintly man's secret.—I am going to the funeral mass.—Here, monsieur," she added to the Governor, handing him a purse of gold, "this is to give your poor prisoners some comforts."

"What slap-up style!" her nephew whispered in approval.

Jacques Collin then followed the warder, who led him back to the yard.

Bibi-Lupin, quite desperate, had at last caught the eye of a real gendarme, to whom, since Jacques Collin had gone, he had been addressing significant "Ahems," and who took his place on guard in the condemned cell. But Trompe-la-Mort's sworn foe was released too late to see the great lady, who drove off in her dashing turn-out, and whose voice, though disguised, fell on his ear with a vicious twang.

"Three hundred shiners for the boarders," said the head warder, showing Bibi-Lupin the purse, which Monsieur Gault had handed over to his clerk.

"Let's see, Monsieur Jacomety," said Bibi-Lupin.

The police agent took the purse, poured out the money into his hand, and examined it curiously.

"Yes, it is gold, sure enough!" said he, "and a coat-of-arms on the purse! The scoundrel! How clever he is! What an all-round villain! He does us all brown——and all the time! He ought to be shot down like a dog!"

"Why, what's the matter?" asked the clerk, taking back the money.

"The matter! Why, the hussy stole it!" cried Bibi-Lupin, stamping with rage on the flags of the gateway.

The words produced a great sensation among the spectators, who were standing at a little distance from Monsieur Sanson. He, too, was still standing, his back against the large stove in the middle of the vaulted hall, awaiting the order to crop the felon's hair and erect the scaffold on the Place de Greve.

On re-entering the yard, Jacques Collin went towards his chums at a pace suited to a frequenter of the galleys.

"What have you on your mind?" said he to la Pouraille.

"My game is up," said the man, whom Jacques Collin led into a corner. "What I want now is a pal I can trust."

"What for?"

La Pouraille, after telling the tale of all his crimes, but in thieves' slang, gave an account of the murder and robbery of the two Crottats.

"You have my respect," said Jacques Collin. "The job was well done; but you seem to me to have blundered afterwards."

"In what way?"

"Well, having done the trick, you ought to have had a Russian passport, have made up as a Russian prince, bought a fine coach with a coat-of-arms on it, have boldly deposited your money in a bank, have got a letter of credit on Hamburg, and then have set out posting to Hamburg with a valet, a ladies' maid, and your mistress disguised as a Russian princess. At Hamburg you should have sailed for Mexico. A chap of spirit, with two hundred and eighty thousand francs in gold, ought to be able to do what he pleases and go where he pleases, flathead!"

"Oh yes, you have such notions because you are the boss. Your nut is always square on your shoulders—but I——"

"In short, a word of good advice in your position is like broth to a dead man," said Jacques Collin, with a serpentlike gaze at his old pal.

"True enough!" said la Pouraille, looking dubious. "But give me the broth, all the same. If it does not suit my stomach, I can warm my feet in it——"

"Here you are nabbed by the Justice, with five robberies and three murders, the latest of them those of two rich and respectable folks.... Now, juries do not like to see respectable folks killed. You will be put through the machine, and there is not a chance for you."

"I have heard all that," said la Pouraille lamentably.

"My aunt Jacqueline, with whom I have just exchanged a few words in the office, and who is, as you know, a mother to the pals, told me that the authorities mean to be quit of you; they are so much afraid of you."

"But I am rich now," said La Pouraille, with a simplicity which showed how convinced a thief is of his natural right to steal. "What are they afraid of?"

"We have no time for philosophizing," said Jacques Collin. "To come back to you——"

"What do you want with me?" said la Pouraille, interrupting his boss.

"You shall see. A dead dog is still worth something."

"To other people," said la Pouraille.

"I take you into my game!" said Jacques Collin.

"Well, that is something," said the murderer. "What next?"

"I do not ask you where your money is, but what you mean to do with it?"

La Pouraille looked into the convict's impenetrable eye, and Jacques coldly went on: "Have you a trip you are sweet upon, or a child, or a pal to be helped? I shall be outside within an hour, and I can do much for any one you want to be good-natured to."

La Pouraille still hesitated; he was delaying with indecision. Jacques Collin produced a clinching argument.

"Your whack of our money would be thirty thousand francs. Do you leave it to the pals? Do you bequeath it to anybody? Your share is safe; I can give it this evening to any one you leave it to."

The murderer gave a little start of satisfaction.

"I have him!" said Jacques Collin to himself. "But we have no time to play. Consider," he went on in la Pouraille's ear, "we have not ten minutes to spare, old chap; the public prosecutor is to send for me, and I am to have a talk with him. I have him safe, and can ring the old boss' neck. I am certain I shall save Madeleine."

"If you save Madeleine, my good boss, you can just as easily——"

"Don't waste your spittle," said Jacques Collin shortly. "Make your will."

"Well, then—I want to leave the money to la Gonore," replied la Pouraille piteously.

"What! Are you living with Moses' widow—the Jew who led the swindling gang in the South?" asked Jacques Collin.

For Trompe-la-Mort, like a great general, knew the person of every one of his army.

"That's the woman," said la Pouraille, much flattered.

"A pretty woman," said Jacques Collin, who knew exactly how to manage his dreadful tools. "The moll is a beauty; she is well informed, and stands by her mates, and a first-rate hand. Yes, la Gonore has made a new man of you! What a flat you must be to risk your nut when you have a trip like her at home! You noodle; you should have set up some respectable little shop and lived quietly.—And what does she do?"

"She is settled in the Rue Sainte-Barbe, managing a house——"

"And she is to be your legatee? Ah, my dear boy, this is what such sluts bring us to when we are such fools as to love them."

"Yes, but don't you give her anything till I am done for."

"It is a sacred trust," said Jacques Collin very seriously.

"And nothing to the pals?"

"Nothing! They blowed the gaff for me," answered la Pouraille vindictively.

"Who did? Shall I serve 'em out?" asked Jacques Collin eagerly, trying to rouse the last sentiment that survives in these souls till the last hour. "Who knows, old pal, but I might at the same time do them a bad turn and serve you with the public prosecutor?"

The murderer looked at his boss with amazed satisfaction.

"At this moment," the boss replied to this expressive look, "I am playing the game only for Theodore. When this farce is played out, old boy, I might do wonders for a chum—for you are a chum of mine."

"If I see that you really can put off the engagement for that poor little Theodore, I will do anything you choose—there!"

"But the trick is done. I am sure to save his head. If you want to get out of the scrape, you see, la Pouraille, you must be ready to do a good turn—we can do nothing single-handed——"

"That's true," said the felon.

His confidence was so strong, and his faith in the boss so fanatical, that he no longer hesitated. La Pouraille revealed the names of his accomplices, a secret hitherto well kept. This was all Jacques needed to know.

"That is the whole story. Ruffard was the third in the job with me and Godet——"

"Arrache-Laine?" cried Jacques Collin, giving Ruffard his nickname among the gang.

"That's the man.—And the blackguards peached because I knew where they had hidden their whack, and they did not know where mine was."

"You are making it all easy, my cherub!" said Jacques Collin.

"What?"

"Well," replied the master, "you see how wise it is to trust me entirely. Your revenge is now part of the hand I am playing.—I do not ask you to tell me where the dibs are, you can tell me at the last moment; but tell me all about Ruffard and Godet."

"You are, and you always will be, our boss; I have no secrets from you," replied la Pouraille. "My money is in the cellar at la Gonore's."

"And you are not afraid of her telling?"

"Why, get along! She knows nothing about my little game!" replied la Pouraille. "I make her drunk, though she is of the sort that would never blab even with her head under the knife.—But such a lot of gold——!"

"Yes, that turns the milk of the purest conscience," replied Jacques Collin.

"So I could do the job with no peepers to spy me. All the chickens were gone to roost. The shiners are three feet underground behind some wine-bottles. And I spread some stones and mortar over them."

"Good," said Jacques Collin. "And the others?"

"Ruffard's pieces are with la Gonore in the poor woman's bedroom, and he has her tight by that, for she might be nabbed as accessory after the fact, and end her days in Saint-Lazare."

"The villain! The reelers teach a thief what's what," said Jacques.

"Godet left his pieces at his sister's, a washerwoman; honest girl, she may be caught for five years in La Force without dreaming of it. The pal raised the tiles of the floor, put them back again, and guyed."

"Now do you know what I want you to do?" said Jacques Collin, with a magnetizing gaze at la Pouraille.

"What?"

"I want you to take Madeleine's job on your shoulders."

La Pouraille started queerly; but he at once recovered himself and stood at attention under the boss' eye.

"So you shy at that? You dare to spoil my game? Come, now! Four murders or three. Does it not come to the same thing?"

"Perhaps."

"By the God of good-fellowship, there is no blood in your veins! And I was thinking of saving you!"

"How?"

"Idiot, if we promise to give the money back to the family, you will only be lagged for life. I would not give a piece for your nut if we keep the blunt, but at this moment you are worth seven hundred thousand francs, you flat."

"Good for you, boss!" cried la Pouraille in great glee.

"And then," said Jacques Collin, "besides casting all the murders on Ruffard—Bibi-Lupin will be finely cold. I have him this time."

La Pouraille was speechless at this suggestion; his eyes grew round, and he stood like an image.

He had been three months in custody, and was committed for trial, and his chums at La Force, to whom he had never mentioned his accomplices, had given him such small comfort, that he was entirely hopeless after his examination, and this simple expedient had been quite overlooked by these prison-ridden minds. This semblance of a hope almost stupefied his brain.

"Have Ruffard and Godet had their spree yet? Have they forked out any of the yellow boys?" asked Jacques Collin.

"They dare not," replied la Pouraille. "The wretches are waiting till I am turned off. That is what my moll sent me word by la Biffe when she came to see le Biffon."

"Very well; we will have their whack of money in twenty-four hours," said Jacques Collin. "Then the blackguards cannot pay up, as you will; you will come out as white as snow, and they will be red with all that blood! By my kind offices you will seem a good sort of fellow led away by them. I shall have money enough of yours to prove alibis on the other counts, and when you are back on the hulks—for you are bound to go there—you must see about escaping. It is a dog's life, still it is life!"

La Pouraille's eyes glittered with suppressed delirium.

"With seven hundred thousand francs you can get a good many drinks," said Jacques Collin, making his pal quite drunk with hope.

"Ay, ay, boss!"

"I can bamboozle the Minister of Justice.—Ah, ha! Ruffard will shell out to do for a reeler. Bibi-Lupin is fairly gulled!"

"Very good, it is a bargain," said la Pouraille with savage glee. "You order, and I obey."

And he hugged Jacques Collin in his arms, while tears of joy stood in his eyes, so hopeful did he feel of saving his head.

"That is not all," said Jacques Collin; "the public prosecutor does not swallow everything, you know, especially when a new count is entered against you. The next thing is to bring a moll into the case by blowing the gaff."

"But how, and what for?"

"Do as I bid you; you will see." And Trompe-la-Mort briefly told the secret of the Nanterre murders, showing him how necessary it was to find a woman who would pretend to be Ginetta. Then he and la Pouraille, now in good spirits, went across to le Biffon.

"I know how sweet you are on la Biffe," said Jacques Collin to this man.

The expression in le Biffon's eyes was a horrible poem.

"What will she do while you are on the hulks?"

A tear sparkled in le Biffon's fierce eyes.

"Well, suppose I were to get her lodgings in the Lorcefe des Largues" (the women's La Force, i. e. les Madelonnettes or Saint-Lazare) "for a stretch, allowing that time for you to be sentenced and sent there, to arrive and to escape?"

"Even you cannot work such a miracle. She took no part in the job," replied la Biffe's partner.

"Oh, my good Biffon," said la Pouraille, "our boss is more powerful than God Almighty."

"What is your password for her?" asked Jacques Collin, with the assurance of a master to whom nothing can be refused.

"Sorgue a Pantin (night in Paris). If you say that she knows you have come from me, and if you want her to do as you bid her, show her a five-franc piece and say Tondif."

"She will be involved in the sentence on la Pouraille, and let off with a year in quod for snitching," said Jacques Collin, looking at la Pouraille.

La Pouraille understood his boss' scheme, and by a single look promised to persuade le Biffon to promote it by inducing la Biffe to take upon herself this complicity in the crime la Pouraille was prepared to confess.

"Farewell, my children. You will presently hear that I have saved my boy from Jack Ketch," said Trompe-la-Mort. "Yes, Jack Ketch and his hairdresser were waiting in the office to get Madeleine ready.—There," he added, "they have come to fetch me to go to the public prosecutor."

And, in fact, a warder came out of the gate and beckoned to this extraordinary man, who, in face of the young Corsican's danger, had recovered his own against his own society.



It is worthy of note that at the moment when Lucien's body was taken away from him, Jacques Collin had, with a crowning effort, made up his mind to attempt a last incarnation, not as a human being, but as a thing. He had at last taken the fateful step that Napoleon took on board the boat which conveyed him to the Bellerophon. And a strange concurrence of events aided this genius of evil and corruption in his undertaking.

But though the unlooked-for conclusion of this life of crime may perhaps be deprived of some of the marvelous effect which, in our day, can be given to a narrative only by incredible improbabilities, it is necessary, before we accompany Jacques Collin to the public prosecutor's room, that we should follow Madame Camusot in her visits during the time we have spent in the Conciergerie.

One of the obligations which the historian of manners must unfailingly observe is that of never marring the truth for the sake of dramatic arrangement, especially when the truth is so kind as to be in itself romantic. Social nature, particularly in Paris, allows of such freaks of chance, such complications of whimsical entanglements, that it constantly outdoes the most inventive imagination. The audacity of facts, by sheer improbability or indecorum, rises to heights of "situation" forbidden to art, unless they are softened, cleansed, and purified by the writer.

Madame Camusot did her utmost to dress herself for the morning almost in good taste—a difficult task for the wife of a judge who for six years has lived in a provincial town. Her object was to give no hold for criticism to the Marquise d'Espard or the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, in a call so early as between eight and nine in the morning. Amelie Cecile Camusot, nee Thirion, it must be said, only half succeeded; and in a matter of dress is this not a twofold blunder?

Few people can imagine how useful the women of Paris are to ambitious men of every class; they are equally necessary in the world of fashion and the world of thieves, where, as we have seen, they fill a most important part. For instance, suppose that a man, not to find himself left in the lurch, must absolutely get speech within a given time with the high functionary who was of such immense importance under the Restoration, and who is to this day called the Keeper of the Seals—a man, let us say, in the most favorable position, a judge, that is to say, a man familiar with the way of things. He is compelled to seek out the presiding judge of a circuit, or some private or official secretary, and prove to him his need of an immediate interview. But is a Keeper of the Seals ever visible "that very minute"? In the middle of the day, if he is not at the Chamber, he is at the Privy Council, or signing papers, or hearing a case. In the early morning he is out, no one knows where. In the evening he has public and private engagements. If every magistrate could claim a moment's interview under any pretext that might occur to him, the Supreme Judge would be besieged.

The purpose of a private and immediate interview is therefore submitted to the judgment of one of those mediatory potentates who are but an obstacle to be removed, a door that can be unlocked, so long as it is not held by a rival. A woman at once goes to another woman; she can get straight into her bedroom if she can arouse the curiosity of mistress or maid, especially if the mistress is under the stress of a strong interest or pressing necessity.

Call this female potentate Madame la Marquise d'Espard, with whom a Minister has to come to terms; this woman writes a little scented note, which her man-servant carries to the Minister's man-servant. The note greets the Minister on his waking, and he reads it at once. Though the Minister has business to attend to, the man is enchanted to have a reason for calling on one of the Queens of Paris, one of the Powers of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, one of the favorites of the Dauphiness, of MADAME, or of the King. Casimir Perier, the only real statesman of the Revolution of July, would leave anything to call on a retired Gentleman of the bed-chamber to King Charles X.

This theory accounts for the magical effect of the words:

"Madame,—Madame Camusot, on very important business, which she says you know of," spoken in Madame d'Espard's ear by her maid, who thought she was awake.

And the Marquise desired that Amelie should be shown in at once.

The magistrate's wife was attentively heard when she began with these words:

"Madame la Marquise, we have ruined ourselves by trying to avenge you——"

"How is that, my dear?" replied the Marquise, looking at Madame Camusot in the dim light that fell through the half-open door. "You are vastly sweet this morning in that little bonnet. Where do you get that shape?"

"You are very kind, madame.—Well, you know that Camusot's way of examining Lucien de Rubempre drove the young man to despair, and he hanged himself in prison."

"Oh, what will become of Madame de Serizy?" cried the Marquise, affecting ignorance, that she might hear the whole story once more.

"Alas! they say she is quite mad," said Amelie. "If you could persuade the Lord Keeper to send for my husband this minute, by special messenger, to meet him at the Palais, the Minister would hear some strange mysteries, and report them, no doubt, to the King.... Then Camusot's enemies would be reduced to silence."

"But who are Camusot's enemies?" asked Madame d'Espard.

"The public prosecutor, and now Monsieur de Serizy."

"Very good, my dear," replied Madame d'Espard, who owed to Monsieur de Granville and the Comte de Serizy her defeat in the disgraceful proceedings by which she had tried to have her husband treated as a lunatic, "I will protect you; I never forget either my foes or my friends."

She rang; the maid drew open the curtains, and daylight flooded the room; she asked for her desk, and the maid brought it in. The Marquise hastily scrawled a few lines.

"Tell Godard to go on horseback, and carry this note to the Chancellor's office.—There is no reply," said she to the maid.

The woman went out of the room quickly, but, in spite of the order, remained at the door for some minutes.

"There are great mysteries going forward then?" asked Madame d'Espard. "Tell me all about it, dear child. Has Clotilde de Grandlieu put a finger in the pie?"

"You will know everything from the Lord Keeper, for my husband has told me nothing. He only told me he was in danger. It would be better for us that Madame de Serizy should die than that she should remain mad."

"Poor woman!" said the Marquise. "But was she not mad already?"

Women of the world, by a hundred ways of pronouncing the same phrase, illustrate to attentive hearers the infinite variety of musical modes. The soul goes out into the voice as it does into the eyes; it vibrates in light and in air—the elements acted on by the eyes and the voice. By the tone she gave to the two words, "Poor woman!" the Marquise betrayed the joy of satisfied hatred, the pleasure of triumph. Oh! what woes did she not wish to befall Lucien's protectress. Revenge, which nothing can assuage, which can survive the person hated, fills us with dark terrors. And Madame Camusot, though harsh herself, vindictive, and quarrelsome, was overwhelmed. She could find nothing to say, and was silent.

"Diane told me that Leontine went to the prison," Madame d'Espard went on. "The dear Duchess is in despair at such a scandal, for she is so foolish as to be very fond of Madame de Serizy; however, it is comprehensible: they both adored that little fool Lucien at about the same time, and nothing so effectually binds or severs two women as worshiping at the same altar. And our dear friend spent two hours yesterday in Leontine's room. The poor Countess, it seems, says dreadful things! I heard that it was disgusting! A woman of rank ought not to give way to such attacks.—Bah! A purely physical passion.—The Duchess came to see me as pale as death; she really was very brave. There are monstrous things connected with this business."

"My husband will tell the Keeper of the Seals all he knows for his own justification, for they wanted to save Lucien, and he, Madame la Marquise, did his duty. An examining judge always has to question people in private at the time fixed by law! He had to ask the poor little wretch something, if only for form's sake, and the young fellow did not understand, and confessed things——"

"He was an impertinent fool!" said Madame d'Espard in a hard tone.

The judge's wife kept silence on hearing this sentence.

"Though we failed in the matter of the Commission in Lunacy, it was not Camusot's fault, I shall never forget that," said the Marquise after a pause. "It was Lucien, Monsieur de Serizy, Monsieur de Bauvan, and Monsieur de Granville who overthrew us. With time God will be on my side; all those people will come to grief.—Be quite easy, I will send the Chevalier d'Espard to the Keeper of the Seals that he may desire your husbands's presence immediately, if that is of any use."

"Oh! madame——"

"Listen," said the Marquise. "I promise you the ribbon of the Legion of Honor at once—to-morrow. It will be a conspicuous testimonial of satisfaction with your conduct in this affair. Yes, it implies further blame on Lucien; it will prove him guilty. Men do not commonly hang themselves for the pleasure of it.—Now, good-bye, my pretty dear——"

Ten minutes later Madame Camusot was in the bedroom of the beautiful Diane de Maufrigneuse, who had not gone to bed till one, and at nine o'clock had not yet slept.

However insensible duchesses may be, even these women, whose hearts are of stone, cannot see a friend a victim to madness without being painfully impressed by it.

And besides, the connection between Diane and Lucien, though at an end now eighteen months since, had left such memories with the Duchess that the poor boy's disastrous end had been to her also a fearful blow. All night Diane had seen visions of the beautiful youth, so charming, so poetical, who had been so delightful a lover—painted as Leontine depicted him, with the vividness of wild delirium. She had letters from Lucien that she had kept, intoxicating letters worthy to compare with Mirabeau's to Sophie, but more literary, more elaborate, for Lucien's letters had been dictated by the most powerful of passions—Vanity. Having the most bewitching of duchesses for his mistress, and seeing her commit any folly for him—secret follies, of course—had turned Lucien's head with happiness. The lover's pride had inspired the poet. And the Duchess had treasured these touching letters, as some old men keep indecent prints, for the sake of their extravagant praise of all that was least duchess-like in her nature.

"And he died in a squalid prison!" cried she to herself, putting the letters away in a panic when she heard her maid knocking gently at her door.

"Madame Camusot," said the woman, "on business of the greatest importance to you, Madame la Duchesse."

Diane sprang to her feet in terror.

"Oh!" cried she, looking at Amelie, who had assumed a duly condoling air, "I guess it all—my letters! It is about my letters. Oh, my letters, my letters!"

She sank on to a couch. She remembered now how, in the extravagance of her passion, she had answered Lucien in the same vein, had lauded the man's poetry as he has sung the charms of the woman, and in what a strain!

"Alas, yes, madame, I have come to save what is dearer to you than life—your honor. Compose yourself and get dressed, we must go to the Duchesse de Grandlieu; happily for you, you are not the only person compromised."

"But at the Palais, yesterday, Leontine burned, I am told, all the letters found at poor Lucien's."

"But, madame, behind Lucien there was Jacques Collin!" cried the magistrate's wife. "You always forget that horrible companionship which beyond question led to that charming and lamented young man's end. That Machiavelli of the galleys never loses his head! Monsieur Camusot is convinced that the wretch has in some safe hiding-place all the most compromising letters written by you ladies to his——"

"His friend," the Duchess hastily put in. "You are right, my child. We must hold council at the Grandlieus'. We are all concerned in this matter, and Serizy happily will lend us his aid."

Extreme peril—as we have observed in the scenes in the Conciergerie—has a hold over the soul not less terrible than that of powerful reagents over the body. It is a mental Voltaic battery. The day, perhaps, is not far off when the process shall be discovered by which feeling is chemically converted into a fluid not unlike the electric fluid.

The phenomena were the same in the convict and the Duchess. This crushed, half-dying woman, who had not slept, who was so particular over her dressing, had recovered the strength of a lioness at bay, and the presence of mind of a general under fire. Diane chose her gown and got through her dressing with the alacrity of a grisette who is her own waiting-woman. It was so astounding, that the lady's-maid stood for a moment stock-still, so greatly was she surprised to see her mistress in her shift, not ill pleased perhaps to let the judge's wife discern through the thin cloud of lawn a form as white and as perfect as that of Canova's Venus. It was like a gem in a fold of tissue paper. Diane suddenly remembered where a pair of stays had been put that fastened in front, sparing a woman in a hurry the ill-spent time and fatigue of being laced. She had arranged the lace trimming of her shift and the fulness of the bosom by the time the maid had fetched her petticoat, and crowned the work by putting on her gown. While Amelie, at a sign from the maid, hooked the bodice behind, the woman brought out a pair of thread stockings, velvet boots, a shawl, and a bonnet. Amelie and the maid each drew on a stocking.

"You are the loveliest creature I ever saw!" said Amelie, insidiously kissing Diane's elegant and polished knee with an eager impulse.

"Madame has not her match!" cried the maid.

"There, there, Josette, hold your tongue," replied the Duchess.—"Have you a carriage?" she went on, to Madame Camusot. "Then come along, my dear, we can talk on the road."

And the Duchess ran down the great stairs of the Hotel de Cadignan, putting on her gloves as she went—a thing she had never been known to do.

"To the Hotel de Grandlieu, and drive fast," said she to one of her men, signing to him to get up behind.

The footman hesitated—it was a hackney coach.

"Ah! Madame la Duchesse, you never told me that the young man had letters of yours. Otherwise Camusot would have proceeded differently..."

"Leontine's state so occupied my thoughts that I forgot myself entirely. The poor woman was almost crazy the day before yesterday; imagine the effect on her of this tragical termination. If you could only know, child, what a morning we went through yesterday! It is enough to make one forswear love!—Yesterday Leontine and I were dragged across Paris by a horrible old woman, an old-clothes buyer, a domineering creature, to that stinking and blood-stained sty they call the Palace of Justice, and I said to her as I took her there: 'Is not this enough to make us fall on our knees and cry out like Madame de Nucingen, when she went through one of those awful Mediterranean storms on her way to Naples, "Dear God, save me this time, and never again——!"'

"These two days will certainly have shortened my life.—What fools we are ever to write!—But love prompts us; we receive pages that fire the heart through the eyes, and everything is in a blaze! Prudence deserts us—we reply——"

"But why reply when you can act?" said Madame Camusot.

"It is grand to lose oneself utterly!" cried the Duchess with pride. "It is the luxury of the soul."

"Beautiful women are excusable," said Madame Camusot modestly. "They have more opportunities of falling than we have."

The Duchess smiled.

"We are always too generous," said Diane de Maufrigneuse. "I shall do just like that odious Madame d'Espard."

"And what does she do?" asked the judge's wife, very curious.

"She has written a thousand love-notes——"

"So many!" exclaimed Amelie, interrupting the Duchess.

"Well, my dear, and not a word that could compromise her is to be found in any one of them."

"You would be incapable of maintaining such coldness, such caution," said Madame Camusot. "You are a woman; you are one of those angels who cannot stand out against the devil——"

"I have made a vow to write no more letters. I never in my life wrote to anybody but that unhappy Lucien.—I will keep his letters to my dying day! My dear child, they are fire, and sometimes we want——"

"But if they were found!" said Amelie, with a little shocked expression.

"Oh! I should say they were part of a romance I was writing; for I have copied them all, my dear, and burned the originals."

"Oh, madame, as a reward allow me to read them."

"Perhaps, child," said the Duchess. "And then you will see that he did not write such letters as those to Leontine."

This speech was woman all the world over, of every age and every land.



Madame Camusot, like the frog in la Fontaine's fable, was ready to burst her skin with the joy of going to the Grandlieus' in the society of the beautiful Diane de Maufrigneuse. This morning she would forge one of the links that are so needful to ambition. She could already hear herself addressed as Madame la Presidente. She felt the ineffable gladness of triumphing over stupendous obstacles, of which the greatest was her husband's ineptitude, as yet unrevealed, but to her well known. To win success for a second-rate man! that is to a woman—as to a king—the delight which tempts great actors when they act a bad play a hundred times over. It is the very drunkenness of egoism. It is in a way the Saturnalia of power.

Power can prove itself to itself only by the strange misapplication which leads it to crown some absurd person with the laurels of success while insulting genius—the only strong-hold which power cannot touch. The knighting of Caligula's horse, an imperial farce, has been, and always will be, a favorite performance.

In a few minutes Diane and Amelie had exchanged the elegant disorder of the fair Diane's bedroom for the severe but dignified and splendid austerity of the Duchesse de Grandlieu's rooms.

She, a Portuguese, and very pious, always rose at eight to attend mass at the little church of Sainte-Valere, a chapelry to Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, standing at that time on the esplanade of the Invalides. This chapel, now destroyed, was rebuilt in the Rue de Bourgogne, pending the building of a Gothic church to be dedicated to Sainte-Clotilde.

On hearing the first words spoken in her ear by Diane de Maufrigneuse, this saintly lady went to find Monsieur de Grandlieu, and brought him back at once. The Duke threw a flashing look at Madame Camusot, one of those rapid glances with which a man of the world can guess at a whole existence, or often read a soul. Amelie's dress greatly helped the Duke to decipher the story of a middle-class life, from Alencon to Mantes, and from Mantes to Paris.

Oh! if only the lawyer's wife could have understood this gift in dukes, she could never have endured that politely ironical look; she saw the politeness only. Ignorance shares the privileges of fine breeding.

"This is Madame Camusot, a daughter of Thirion's—one of the Cabinet ushers," said the Duchess to her husband.

The Duke bowed with extreme politeness to the wife of a legal official, and his face became a little less grave.

The Duke had rung for his valet, who now came in.

"Go to the Rue Saint-Honore: take a coach. Ring at a side door, No. 10. Tell the man who opens the door that I beg his master will come here, and if the gentleman is at home, bring him back with you.—Mention my name, that will remove all difficulties.

"And do not be gone more than a quarter of an hour in all."

Another footman, the Duchess' servant, came in as soon as the other was gone.

"Go from me to the Duc de Chaulieu, and send up this card."

The Duke gave him a card folded down in a particular way. When the two friends wanted to meet at once, on any urgent or confidential business which would not allow of note-writing, they used this means of communication.

Thus we see that similar customs prevail in every rank of society, and differ only in manner, civility, and small details. The world of fashion, too, has its argot, its slang; but that slang is called style.

"Are you quite sure, madame, of the existence of the letters you say were written by Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu to this young man?" said the Duc de Grandlieu.

And he cast a look at Madame Camusot as a sailor casts a sounding line.

"I have not seen them, but there is reason to fear it," replied Madame Camusot, quaking.

"My daughter can have written nothing we would not own to!" said the Duchess.

"Poor Duchess!" thought Diane, with a glance at the Duke that terrified him.

"What do you think, my dear little Diane?" said the Duke in a whisper, as he led her away into a recess.

"Clotilde is so crazy about Lucien, my dear friend, that she had made an assignation with him before leaving. If it had not been for little Lenoncourt, she would perhaps have gone off with him into the forest of Fontainebleau. I know that Lucien used to write letters to her which were enough to turn the brain of a saint.—We are three daughters of Eve in the coils of the serpent of letter-writing."

The Duke and Diane came back to the Duchess and Madame Camusot, who were talking in undertones. Amelie, following the advice of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, affected piety to win the proud lady's favor.

"We are at the mercy of a dreadful escaped convict!" said the Duke, with a peculiar shrug. "This is what comes of opening one's house to people one is not absolutely sure of. Before admitting an acquaintance, one ought to know all about his fortune, his relations, all his previous history——"

This speech is the moral of my story—from the aristocratic point of view.

"That is past and over," said the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse. "Now we must think of saving that poor Madame de Serizy, Clotilde, and me——"

"We can but wait for Henri; I have sent to him. But everything really depends on the man Gentil is gone to fetch. God grant that man may be in Paris!—Madame," he added to Madame Camusot, "thank you so much for having thought of us——"

This was Madame Camusot's dismissal. The daughter of the court usher had wit enough to understand the Duke; she rose. But the Duchess de Maufrigneuse, with the enchanting grace which had won her so much friendship and discretion, took Amelie by the hand as if to show her, in a way, to the Duke and Duchess.

"On my own account," said she, "to say nothing of her having been up before daybreak to save us all, I may ask for more than a remembrance for my little Madame Camusot. In the first place, she has already done me such a service as I cannot forget; and then she is wholly devoted to our side, she and her husband. I have promised that her Camusot shall have advancement, and I beg you above everything to help him on, for my sake."

"You need no such recommendation," said the Duke to Madame Camusot. "The Grandlieus always remember a service done them. The King's adherents will ere long have a chance of distinguishing themselves; they will be called upon to prove their devotion; your husband will be placed in the front——"

Madame Camusot withdrew, proud, happy, puffed up to suffocation. She reached home triumphant; she admired herself, she made light of the public prosecutor's hostility. She said to herself:

"Supposing we were to send Monsieur de Granville flying——"

It was high time for Madame Camusot to vanish. The Duc de Chaulieu, one of the King's prime favorites, met the bourgeoise on the outer steps.

"Henri," said the Duc de Grandlieu when he heard his friend announced, "make haste, I beg of you, to get to the Chateau, try to see the King—the business of this;" and he led the Duke into the window-recess, where he had been talking to the airy and charming Diane.

Now and then the Duc de Chaulieu glanced in the direction of the flighty Duchess, who, while talking to the pious Duchess and submitting to be lectured, answered the Duc de Chaulieu's expressive looks.

"My dear child," said the Duc de Grandlieu to her at last, the aside being ended, "do be good! Come, now," and he took Diane's hands, "observe the proprieties of life, do not compromise yourself any more, write no letters. Letters, my dear, have caused as much private woe as public mischief. What might be excusable in a girl like Clotilde, in love for the first time, had no excuse in——"

"An old soldier who has been under fire," said Diane with a pout.

This grimace and the Duchess' jest brought a smile to the face of the two much-troubled Dukes, and of the pious Duchess herself.

"But for four years I have never written a billet-doux.—Are we saved?" asked Diane, who hid her curiosity under this childishness.

"Not yet," said the Duc de Chaulieu. "You have no notion how difficult it is to do an arbitrary thing. In a constitutional king it is what infidelity is in a wife: it is adultery."

"The fascinating sin," said the Duc de Grandlieu.

"Forbidden fruit!" said Diane, smiling. "Oh! how I wish I were the Government, for I have none of that fruit left—I have eaten it all."

"Oh! my dear, my dear!" said the elder Duchess, "you really go too far."

The two Dukes, hearing a coach stop at the door with the clatter of horses checked in full gallop, bowed to the ladies and left them, going into the Duc de Grandlieu's study, whither came the gentleman from the Rue Honore-Chevalier—no less a man than the chief of the King's private police, the obscure but puissant Corentin.

"Go on," said the Duc de Grandlieu; "go first, Monsieur de Saint-Denis."

Corentin, surprised that the Duke should have remembered him, went forward after bowing low to the two noblemen.

"Always about the same individual, or about his concerns, my dear sir," said the Duc de Grandlieu.

"But he is dead," said Corentin.

"He has left a partner," said the Duc de Chaulieu, "a very tough customer."

"The convict Jacques Collin," replied Corentin.

"Will you speak, Ferdinand?" said the Duke de Chaulieu to his friend.

"That wretch is an object of fear," said the Duc de Grandlieu, "for he has possessed himself, so as to be able to levy blackmail, of the letters written by Madame de Serizy and Madame de Maufrigneuse to Lucien Chardon, that man's tool. It would seem that it was a matter of system in the young man to extract passionate letters in return for his own, for I am told that Mademoiselle de Grandlieu had written some—at least, so we fear—and we cannot find out from her—she is gone abroad."

"That little young man," replied Corentin, "was incapable of so much foresight. That was a precaution due to the Abbe Carlos Herrera."

Corentin rested his elbow on the arm of the chair on which he was sitting, and his head on his hand, meditating.

"Money!—The man has more than we have," said he. "Esther Gobseck served him as a bait to extract nearly two million francs from that well of gold called Nucingen.—Gentlemen, get me full legal powers, and I will rid you of the fellow."

"And—the letters?" asked the Duc de Grandlieu.

"Listen to me, gentlemen," said Corentin, standing up, his weasel-face betraying his excitement.

He thrust his hands into the pockets of his black doeskin trousers, shaped over the shoes. This great actor in the historical drama of the day had only stopped to put on a waistcoat and frock-coat, and had not changed his morning trousers, so well he knew how grateful men can be for immediate action in certain cases. He walked up and down the room quite at his ease, haranguing loudly, as if he had been alone.

"He is a convict. He could be sent off to Bicetre without trial, and put in solitary confinement, without a soul to speak to, and left there to die.—But he may have given instructions to his adherents, foreseeing this possibility."

"But he was put into the secret cells," said the Duc de Grandlieu, "the moment he was taken into custody at that woman's house."

"Is there such a thing as a secret cell for such a fellow as he is?" said Corentin. "He is a match for—for me!"

"What is to be done?" said the Dukes to each other by a glance.

"We can send the scoundrel back to the hulks at once—to Rochefort; he will be dead in six months! Oh! without committing any crime," he added, in reply to a gesture on the part of the Duc de Grandlieu. "What do you expect? A convict cannot hold out more than six months of a hot summer if he is made to work really hard among the marshes of the Charente. But this is of no use if our man has taken precautions with regard to the letters. If the villain has been suspicious of his foes, and that is probable, we must find out what steps he has taken. Then, if the present holder of the letters is poor, he is open to bribery. So, no, we must make Jacques Collin speak. What a duel! He will beat me. The better plan would be to purchase those letters by exchange for another document—a letter of reprieve—and to place the man in my gang. Jacques Collin is the only man alive who is clever enough to come after me, poor Contenson and dear old Peyrade both being dead! Jacques Collin killed those two unrivaled spies on purpose, as it were, to make a place for himself. So, you see, gentlemen, you must give me a free hand. Jacques Collin is in the Conciergerie. I will go to see Monsieur de Granville in his Court. Send some one you can trust to meet me there, for I must have a letter to show to Monsieur de Granville, who knows nothing of me. I will hand the letter to the President of the Council, a very impressive sponsor. You have half an hour before you, for I need half an hour to dress, that is to say, to make myself presentable to the eyes of the public prosecutor."

"Monsieur," said the Duc de Chaulieu, "I know your wonderful skill. I only ask you to say Yes or No. Will you be bound to succeed?"

"Yes, if I have full powers, and your word that I shall never be questioned about the matter.—My plan is laid."

This sinister reply made the two fine gentlemen shiver. "Go on, then, monsieur," said the Duc de Chaulieu. "You can set down the charges of the case among those you are in the habit of undertaking."

Corentin bowed and went away.

Henri de Lenoncourt, for whom Ferdinand de Grandlieu had a carriage brought out, went off forthwith to the King, whom he was privileged to see at all times in right of his office.

Thus all the various interests that had got entangled from the highest to the lowest ranks of society were to meet presently in Monsieur de Granville's room at the Palais, all brought together by necessity embodied in three men—Justice in Monsieur de Granville, and the family in Corentin, face to face with Jacques Collin, the terrible foe who represented social crime in its fiercest energy.

What a duel is that between justice and arbitrary wills on one side and the hulks and cunning on the other! The hulks—symbolical of that daring which throws off calculation and reflection, which avails itself of any means, which has none of the hyprocrisy of high-handed justice, but is the hideous outcome of the starving stomach—the swift and bloodthirsty pretext of hunger. Is it not attack as against self-protection, theft as against property? The terrible quarrel between the social state and the natural man, fought out on the narrowest possible ground! In short, it is a terrible and vivid image of those compromises, hostile to social interests, which the representatives of authority, when they lack power, submit to with the fiercest rebels.

When Monsieur Camusot was announced, the public prosecutor signed that he should be admitted. Monsieur de Granville had foreseen this visit, and wished to come to an understanding with the examining judge as to how to wind up this business of Lucien's death. The end could no longer be that on which he had decided the day before in agreement with Camusot, before the suicide of the hapless poet.

"Sit down, Monsieur Camusot," said Monsieur de Granville, dropping into his armchair. The public prosecutor, alone with the inferior judge, made no secret of his depressed state. Camusot looked at Monsieur de Granville and observed his almost livid pallor, and such utter fatigue, such complete prostration, as betrayed greater suffering perhaps than that of the condemned man to whom the clerk had announced the rejection of his appeal. And yet that announcement, in the forms of justice, is a much as to say, "Prepare to die; your last hour has come."

"I will return later, Monsieur le Comte," said Camusot. "Though business is pressing——"

"No, stay," replied the public prosecutor with dignity. "A magistrate, monsieur, must accept his anxieties and know how to hide them. I was in fault if you saw any traces of agitation in me——"

Camusot bowed apologetically.

"God grant you may never know these crucial perplexities of our life. A man might sink under less! I have just spent the night with one of my most intimate friends.—I have but two friends, the Comte Octave de Bauvan and the Comte de Serizy.—We sat together, Monsieur de Serizy, the Count, and I, from six in the evening till six this morning, taking it in turns to go from the drawing-room to Madame de Serizy's bedside, fearing each time that we might find her dead or irremediably insane. Desplein, Bianchon, and Sinard never left the room, and she has two nurses. The Count worships his wife. Imagine the night I have spent, between a woman crazy with love and a man crazy with despair. And a statesman's despair is not like that of an idiot. Serizy, as calm as if he were sitting in his place in council, clutched his chair to force himself to show us an unmoved countenance, while sweat stood over the brows bent by so much hard thought.—Worn out by want of sleep, I dozed from five till half-past seven, and I had to be here by half-past eight to warrant an execution. Take my word for it, Monsieur Camusot, when a judge has been toiling all night in such gulfs of sorrow, feeling the heavy hand of God on all human concerns, and heaviest on noble souls, it is hard to sit down here, in front of a desk, and say in cold blood, 'Cut off a head at four o'clock! Destroy one of God's creatures full of life, health, and strength!'—And yet this is my duty! Sunk in grief myself, I must order the scaffold——

"The condemned wretch cannot know that his judge suffers anguish equal to his own. At this moment he and I, linked by a sheet of paper—I, society avenging itself; he, the crime to be avenged—embody the same duty seen from two sides; we are two lives joined for the moment by the sword of the law.

"Who pities the judge's deep sorrow? Who can soothe it? Our glory is to bury it in the depth of our heart. The priest with his life given to God, the soldier with a thousand deaths for his country's sake, seem to me far happier than the magistrate with his doubts and fears and appalling responsibility.

"You know who the condemned man is?" Monsieur de Granville went on. "A young man of seven-and-twenty—as handsome as he who killed himself yesterday, and as fair; condemned against all our anticipations, for the only proof against him was his concealment of the stolen goods. Though sentenced, the lad will confess nothing! For seventy days he has held out against every test, constantly declaring that he is innocent. For two months I have felt two heads on my shoulders! I would give a year of my life if he would confess, for juries need encouragement; and imagine what a blow it would be to justice if some day it should be discovered that the crime for which he is punished was committed by another.

"In Paris everything is so terribly important; the most trivial incidents in the law courts have political consequences.

"The jury, an institution regarded by the legislators of the Revolution as a source of strength, is, in fact, an instrument of social ruin, for it fails in action; it does not sufficiently protect society. The jury trifles with its functions. The class of jurymen is divided into two parties, one averse to capital punishment; the result is a total upheaval of true equality in administration of the law. Parricide, a most horrible crime, is in some departments treated with leniency, while in others a common murder, so to speak, is punished with death. [There are in penal servitude twenty-three parricides who have been allowed the benefit of extenuating circumstances.] And what would happen if here in Paris, in our home district, an innocent man should be executed!"

"He is an escaped convict," said Monsieur Camusot, diffidently.

"The Opposition and the Press would make him a paschal lamb!" cried Monsieur de Granville; "and the Opposition would enjoy white-washing him, for he is a fanatical Corsican, full of his native notions, and his murders were a Vendetta. In that island you may kill your enemy, and think yourself, and be thought, a very good man.

"A thorough-paced magistrate, I tell you, is an unhappy man. They ought to live apart from all society, like the pontiffs of old. The world should never see them but at fixed hours, leaving their cells, grave, and old, and venerable, passing sentence like the high priests of antiquity, who combined in their person the functions of judicial and sacerdotal authority. We should be accessible only in our high seat.—As it is, we are to be seen every day, amused or unhappy, like other men. We are to be found in drawing-rooms and at home, as ordinary citizens, moved by our passions; and we seem, perhaps, more grotesque than terrible."

This bitter cry, broken by pauses and interjections, and emphasized by gestures which gave it an eloquence impossible to reduce to writing, made Camusot's blood run chill.

"And I, monsieur," said he, "began yesterday my apprenticeship to the sufferings of our calling.—I could have died of that young fellow's death. He misunderstood my wish to be lenient, and the poor wretch committed himself."

"Ah, you ought never to have examined him!" cried Monsieur de Granville; "it is so easy to oblige by doing nothing."

"And the law, monsieur?" replied Camusot. "He had been in custody two days."

"The mischief is done," said the public prosecutor. "I have done my best to remedy what is indeed irremediable. My carriage and servants are following the poor weak poet to the grave. Serizy has sent his too; nay, more, he accepts the duty imposed on him by the unfortunate boy, and will act as his executor. By promising this to his wife he won from her a gleam of returning sanity. And Count Octave is attending the funeral in person."

"Well, then, Monsieur le Comte," said Camusot, "let us complete our work. We have a very dangerous man on our hands. He is Jacques Collin—and you know it as well as I do. The ruffian will be recognized——"

"Then we are lost!" cried Monsieur de Granville.

"He is at this moment shut up with your condemned murderer, who, on the hulks, was to him what Lucien has been in Paris—a favorite protege. Bibi-Lupin, disguised as a gendarme, is watching the interview."

"What business has the superior police to interfere?" said the public prosecutor. "He has no business to act without my orders!"

"All the Conciergerie must know that we have caught Jacques Collin.—Well, I have come on purpose to tell you that this daring felon has in his possession the most compromising letters of Lucien's correspondence with Madame de Serizy, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu."

"Are you sure of that?" asked Monsieur de Granville, his face full of pained surprise.

"You shall hear, Monsieur le Comte, what reason I have to fear such a misfortune. When I untied the papers found in the young man's rooms, Jacques Collin gave a keen look at the parcel, and smiled with satisfaction in a way that no examining judge could misunderstand. So deep a villain as Jacques Collin takes good care not to let such a weapon slip through his fingers. What is to be said if these documents should be placed in the hands of counsel chosen by that rascal from among the foes of the government and the aristocracy!—My wife, to whom the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse has shown so much kindness, is gone to warn her, and by this time they must be with the Grandlieus holding council."

"But we cannot possibly try the man!" cried the public prosecutor, rising and striding up and down the room. "He must have put the papers in some safe place——"

"I know where," said Camusot.

These words finally effaced every prejudice the public prosecutor had felt against him.

"Well, then——" said Monsieur de Granville, sitting down again.

"On my way here this morning I reflected deeply on this miserable business. Jacques Collin has an aunt—an aunt by nature, not putative—a woman concerning whom the superior police have communicated a report to the Prefecture. He is this woman's pupil and idol; she is his father's sister, her name is Jacqueline Collin. This wretched woman carries on a trade as a wardrobe purchaser, and by the connection this business has secured her she gets hold of many family secrets. If Jacques Collin has intrusted those papers, which would be his salvation, to any one's keeping, it is to that of this creature. Have her arrested."

The public prosecutor gave Camusot a keen look, as much as to say, "This man is not such a fool as I thought him; he is still young, and does not yet know how to handle the reins of justice."

"But," Camusot went on, "in order to succeed, we must give up all the plans we laid yesterday, and I came to take your advice—your orders——"

The public prosecutor took up his paper-knife and tapped it against the edge of the table with one of the tricky movements familiar to thoughtful men when they give themselves up to meditation.

"Three noble families involved!" he exclaimed. "We must not make the smallest blunder!—You are right: as a first step let us act on Fouche's principle, 'Arrest!'—and Jacques Collin must at once be sent back to the secret cells."

"That is to proclaim him a convict and to ruin Lucien's memory!"

"What a desperate business!" said Monsieur de Granville. "There is danger on every side."

At this instant the governor of the Conciergerie came in, not without knocking; and the private room of a public prosecutor is so well guarded, that only those concerned about the courts may even knock at the door.

"Monsieur le Comte," said Monsieur Gault, "the prisoner calling himself Carlos Herrera wishes to speak with you."

"Has he had communication with anybody?" asked Monsieur de Granville.

"With all the prisoners, for he has been out in the yard since about half-past seven. And he has seen the condemned man, who would seem to have talked to him."

A speech of Camusot's, which recurred to his mind like a flash of light, showed Monsieur de Granville all the advantage that might be taken of a confession of intimacy between Jacques Collin and Theodore Calvi to obtain the letters. The public prosecutor, glad to have an excuse for postponing the execution, beckoned Monsieur Gault to his side.

"I intend," said he, "to put off the execution till to-morrow; but let no one in the prison suspect it. Absolute silence! Let the executioner seem to be superintending the preparations.

"Send the Spanish priest here under a strong guard; the Spanish Embassy claims his person! Gendarmes can bring up the self-styled Carlos by your back stairs so that he may see no one. Instruct the men each to hold him by one arm, and never let him go till they reach this door.

"Are you sure, Monsieur Gault, that this dangerous foreigner has spoken to no one but the prisoners!"

"Ah! just as he came out of the condemned cell a lady came to see him——"

The two magistrates exchanged looks, and such looks!

"What lady was that!" asked Camusot.

"One of his penitents—a Marquise," replied Gault.

"Worse and worse!" said Monsieur de Granville, looking at Camusot.

"She gave all the gendarmes and warders a sick headache," said Monsieur Gault, much puzzled.

"Nothing can be a matter of indifference in your business," said the public prosecutor. "The Conciergerie has not such tremendous walls for nothing. How did this lady get in?"

"With a regular permit, monsieur," replied the governor. "The lady, beautifully dressed, in a fine carriage with a footman and a chasseur, came to see her confessor before going to the funeral of the poor young man whose body you had had removed."

"Bring me the order for admission," said Monsieur de Granville.

"It was given on the recommendation of the Comte de Serizy."

"What was the woman like?" asked the public prosecutor.

"She seemed to be a lady."

"Did you see her face?"

"She wore a black veil."

"What did they say to each other?"

"Well—a pious person, with a prayer-book in her hand—what could she say? She asked the Abbe's blessing and went on her knees."

"Did they talk together a long time?"

"Not five minutes; but we none of us understood what they said; they spoke Spanish no doubt."

"Tell us everything, monsieur," the public prosecutor insisted. "I repeat, the very smallest detail is to us of the first importance. Let this be a caution to you."

"She was crying, monsieur."

"Really weeping?"

"That we could not see, she hid her face in her handkerchief. She left three hundred francs in gold for the prisoners."

"That was not she!" said Camusot.

"Bibi-Lupin at once said, 'She is a thief!'" said Monsieur Gault.

"He knows the tribe," said Monsieur de Granville.—"Get out your warrant," he added, turning to Camusot, "and have seals placed on everything in her house—at once! But how can she have got hold of Monsieur de Serizy's recommendation?—Bring me the order—and go, Monsieur Gault; send me that Abbe immediately. So long as we have him safe, the danger cannot be greater. And in the course of two hours' talk you get a long way into a man's mind."

"Especially such a public prosecutor as you are," said Camusot insidiously.

"There will be two of us," replied Monsieur de Granville politely.

And he became discursive once more.

"There ought to be created for every prison parlor, a post of superintendent, to be given with a good salary to the cleverest and most energetic police officers," said he, after a long pause. "Bibi-Lupin ought to end his days in such a place. Then we should have an eye and ear on the watch in a department that needs closer supervision than it gets.—Monsieur Gault could tell us nothing positive."

"He has so much to do," said Camusot. "Still, between these secret cells and us there lies a gap which ought not to exist. On the way from the Conciergerie to the judges' rooms there are passages, courtyards, and stairs. The attention of the agents cannot be unflagging, whereas the prisoner is always alive to his own affairs.

"I was told that a lady had already placed herself in the way of Jacques Collin when he was brought up from the cells to be examined. That woman got into the guardroom at the top of the narrow stairs from the mousetrap; the ushers told me, and I blamed the gendarmes."

"Oh! the Palais needs entire reconstruction," said Monsieur de Granville. "But it is an outlay of twenty to thirty million francs! Just try asking the Chambers for thirty millions for the more decent accommodation of Justice."

The sound of many footsteps and a clatter of arms fell on their ear. It would be Jacques Collin.

The public prosecutor assumed a mask of gravity that hid the man. Camusot imitated his chief.

The office-boy opened the door, and Jacques Collin came in, quite calm and unmoved.

"You wished to speak to me," said Monsieur de Granville. "I am ready to listen."

"Monsieur le Comte, I am Jacques Collin. I surrender!"

Camusot started; the public prosecutor was immovable.

"As you may suppose, I have my reasons for doing this," said Jacques Collin, with an ironical glance at the two magistrates. "I must inconvenience you greatly; for if I had remained a Spanish priest, you would simply have packed me off with an escort of gendarmes as far as the frontier by Bayonne, and there Spanish bayonets would have relieved you of me."

The lawyers sat silent and imperturbable.

"Monsieur le Comte," the convict went on, "the reasons which have led me to this step are yet more pressing than this, but devilish personal to myself. I can tell them to no one but you.—If you are afraid——"

"Afraid of whom? Of what?" said the Comte de Granville.

In attitude and expression, in the turn of his head, his demeanor and his look, this distinguished judge was at this moment a living embodiment of the law which ought to supply us with the noblest examples of civic courage. In this brief instant he was on a level with the magistrates of the old French Parlement in the time of the civil wars, when the presidents found themselves face to face with death, and stood, made of marble, like the statues that commemorate them.

"Afraid to be alone with an escaped convict!"

"Leave us, Monsieur Camusot," said the public prosecutor at once.

"I was about to suggest that you should bind me hand and foot," Jacques Collin coolly added, with an ominous glare at the two gentlemen. He paused, and then said with great gravity:

"Monsieur le Comte, you had my esteem, but you now command my admiration."

"Then you think you are formidable?" said the magistrate, with a look of supreme contempt.

"Think myself formidable?" retorted the convict. "Why think about it? I am, and I know it."

Jacques Collin took a chair and sat down, with all the ease of a man who feels himself a match for his adversary in an interview where they would treat on equal terms.

At this instant Monsieur Camusot, who was on the point of closing the door behind him, turned back, came up to Monsieur de Granville, and handed him two folded papers.

"Look!" said he to Monsieur de Granville, pointing to one of them.

"Call back Monsieur Gault!" cried the Comte de Granville, as he read the name of Madame de Maufrigneuse's maid—a woman he knew.

The governor of the prison came in.

"Describe the woman who came to see the prisoner," said the public prosecutor in his ear.

"Short, thick-set, fat, and square," replied Monsieur Gault.

"The woman to whom this permit was given is tall and thin," said Monsieur de Granville. "How old was she?"

"About sixty."

"This concerns me, gentlemen?" said Jacques Collin. "Come, do not puzzle your heads. That person is my aunt, a very plausible aunt, a woman, and an old woman. I can save you a great deal of trouble. You will never find my aunt unless I choose. If we beat about the bush, we shall never get forwarder."

"Monsieur l'Abbe has lost his Spanish accent," observed Monsieur Gault; "he does not speak broken French."

"Because things are in a desperate mess, my dear Monsieur Gault," replied Jacques Collin with a bitter smile, as he addressed the Governor by name.

Monsieur Gault went quickly up to his chief, and said in a whisper, "Beware of that man, Monsieur le Comte; he is mad with rage."

Monsieur de Granville gazed slowly at Jacques Collin, and saw that he was controlling himself; but he saw, too, that what the governor said was true. This treacherous demeanor covered the cold but terrible nervous irritation of a savage. In Jacques Collin's eyes were the lurid fires of a volcanic eruption, his fists were clenched. He was a tiger gathering himself up to spring.

"Leave us," said the Count gravely to the prison governor and the judge.

"You did wisely to send away Lucien's murderer!" said Jacques Collin, without caring whether Camusot heard him or no; "I could not contain myself, I should have strangled him."

Monsieur de Granville felt a chill; never had he seen a man's eyes so full of blood, or cheeks so colorless, or muscles so set.

"And what good would that murder have done you?" he quietly asked.

"You avenge society, or fancy you avenge it, every day, monsieur, and you ask me to give a reason for revenge? Have you never felt vengeance throbbing in surges in your veins? Don't you know that it was that idiot of a judge who killed him?—For you were fond of my Lucien, and he loved you! I know you by heart, sir. The dear boy would tell me everything at night when he came in; I used to put him to bed as a nurse tucks up a child, and I made him tell me everything. He confided everything to me, even his least sensations!

"The best of mothers never loved an only son so tenderly as I loved that angel! If only you knew! All that is good sprang up in his heart as flowers grow in the fields. He was weak; it was his only fault, weak as the string of a lyre, which is so strong when it is taut. These are the most beautiful natures; their weakness is simply tenderness, admiration, the power of expanding in the sunshine of art, of love, of the beauty God has made for man in a thousand shapes!—In short, Lucien was a woman spoiled. Oh! what could I not say to that brute beast who had just gone out of the room!

"I tell you, monsieur, in my degree, as a prisoner before his judge, I did what God A'mighty would have done for His Son if, hoping to save Him, He had gone with Him before Pilate!"

A flood of tears fell from the convict's light tawny eyes, which just now had glared like those of a wolf starved by six months' snow in the plains of the Ukraine. He went on:

"That dolt would listen to nothing, and he killed the boy!—I tell you, sir, I bathed the child's corpse in my tears, crying out to the Power I do not know, and which is above us all! I, who do not believe in God!—(For if I were not a materialist, I should not be myself.)

"I have told everything when I say that. You don't know—no man knows what suffering is. I alone know it. The fire of anguish so dried up my tears, that all last night I could not weep. Now I can, because I feel that you can understand me. I saw you, sitting there just now, an Image of Justice. Oh! monsieur, may God—for I am beginning to believe in Him—preserve you from ever being as bereft as I am! That cursed judge has robbed me of my soul, Monsieur le Comte! At this moment they are burying my life, my beauty, my virtue, my conscience, all my powers! Imagine a dog from which a chemist had extracted the blood.—That's me! I am that dog——

"And that is why I have come to tell you that I am Jacques Collin, and to give myself up. I made up my mind to it this morning when they came and carried away the body I was kissing like a madman—like a mother—as the Virgin must have kissed Jesus in the tomb.

"I meant then to give myself up to justice without driving any bargain; but now I must make one, and you shall know why."

"Are you speaking to the judge or to Monsieur de Granville?" asked the magistrate.

The two men, Crime and Law, looked at each other. The magistrate had been strongly moved by the convict; he felt a sort of divine pity for the unhappy wretch; he understood what his life and feelings were. And besides, the magistrate—for a magistrate is always a magistrate—knowing nothing of Jacques Collin's career since his escape from prison, fancied that he could impress the criminal who, after all, had only been sentenced for forgery. He would try the effect of generosity on this nature, a compound, like bronze, of various elements, of good and evil.

Again, Monsieur de Granville, who had reached the age of fifty-three without ever having been loved, admired a tender soul, as all men do who have not been loved. This despair, the lot of many men to whom women can only give esteem and friendship, was perhaps the unknown bond on which a strong intimacy was based that united the Comtes de Bauvan, de Granville, and de Serizy; for a common misfortune brings souls into unison quite as much as a common joy.

"You have the future before you," said the public prosecutor, with an inquisitorial glance at the dejected villain.

The man only expressed by a shrug the utmost indifference to his fate.

"Lucien made a will by which he leaves you three hundred thousand francs."

"Poor, poor chap! poor boy!" cried Jacques Collin. "Always too honest! I was all wickedness, while he was goodness—noble, beautiful, sublime! Such lovely souls cannot be spoiled. He had taken nothing from me but my money, sir."

This utter and complete surrender of his individuality, which the magistrate vainly strove to rally, so thoroughly proved his dreadful words, that Monsieur de Granville was won over to the criminal. The public prosecutor remained!

"If you really care for nothing," said Monsieur de Granville, "what did you want to say to me?"

"Well, is it not something that I have given myself up? You were getting warm, but you had not got me; besides, you would not have known what to do with me——"

"What an antagonist!" said the magistrate to himself.

"Monsieur le Comte, you are about to cut off the head of an innocent man, and I have discovered the culprit," said Jacques Collin, wiping away his tears. "I have come here not for their sakes, but for yours. I have come to spare you remorse, for I love all who took an interest in Lucien, just as I will give my hatred full play against all who helped to cut off his life—men or women!

"What can a convict more or less matter to me?" he went on, after a short pause. "A convict is no more in my eyes than an emmet is in yours. I am like the Italian brigands—fine men they are! If a traveler is worth ever so little more than the charge of their musket, they shoot him dead.

"I thought only of you.—I got the young man to make a clean breast of it; he was bound to trust me, we had been chained together. Theodore is very good stuff; he thought he was doing his mistress a good turn by undertaking to sell or pawn stolen goods; but he is no more guilty of the Nanterre job than you are. He is a Corsican; it is their way to revenge themselves and kill each other like flies. In Italy and Spain a man's life is not respected, and the reason is plain. There we are believed to have a soul in our own image, which survives us and lives for ever. Tell that to your analyst! It is only among atheistical or philosophical nations that those who mar human life are made to pay so dearly; and with reason from their point of view—a belief only in matter and in the present.

"If Calvi had told you who the woman was from whom he obtained the stolen goods, you would not have found the real murderer; he is already in your hands; but his accomplice, whom poor Theodore will not betray because she is a woman——Well, every calling has its point of honor; convicts and thieves have theirs!

"Now, I know the murderer of those two women and the inventors of that bold, strange plot; I have been told every detail. Postpone Calvi's execution, and you shall know all; but you must give me your word that he shall be sent safe back to the hulks and his punishment commuted. A man so miserable as I am does not take the trouble to lie—you know that. What I have told you is the truth."

"To you, Jacques Collin, though it is degrading Justice, which ought never to condescend to such a compromise, I believe I may relax the rigidity of my office and refer the case to my superiors."

"Will you grant me this life?"

"Possibly."

"Monsieur, I implore you to give me your word; it will be enough."

Monsieur Granville drew himself up with offended pride.

"I hold in my hand the honor of three families, and you only the lives of three convicts in yours," said Jacques Collin. "I have the stronger hand."

"But you may be sent back to the dark cells: then, what will you do?" said the public prosecutor.

"Oh! we are to play the game out then!" said Jacques Collin. "I was speaking as man to man—I was talking to Monsieur de Granville. But if the public prosecutor is my adversary, I take up the cards and hold them close.—And if only you had given me your word, I was ready to give you back the letters that Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu——"

This was said with a tone, an audacity, and a look which showed Monsieur de Granville, that against such an adversary the least blunder was dangerous.

"And is that all you ask?" said the magistrate.

"I will speak for myself now," said Jacques. "The honor of the Grandlieu family is to pay for the commutation of Theodore's sentence. It is giving much to get very little. For what is a convict in penal servitude for life? If he escapes, you can so easily settle the score. It is drawing a bill on the guillotine! Only, as he was consigned to Rochefort with no amiable intentions, you must promise me that he shall be quartered at Toulon, and well treated there.

"Now, for myself, I want something more. I have the packets of letters from Madame de Serizy and Madame de Maufrigneuse.—And what letters!—I tell you, Monsieur le Comte, prostitutes, when they write letters, assume a style of sentiment; well, sir, fine ladies, who are accustomed to style and sentiment all day long, write as prostitutes behave. Philosophers may know the reasons for this contrariness. I do not care to seek them. Woman is an inferior animal; she is ruled by her instincts. To my mind a woman has no beauty who is not like a man.

"So your smart duchesses, who are men in brains only, write masterpieces. Oh! they are splendid from beginning to end, like Piron's famous ode!——"