The Collection of Antiquities

When Victurnien had drawn “his” money, he took it to Mme. de Maufrigneuse.  She locked up the banknotes in her desk, and proposed to bid the world farewell by going to the Opera to see it for the last time.  Victurnien was thoughtful, absent, and uneasy.  He was beginning to reflect.  He thought that his seat in the Duchess’ box might cost him dear; that perhaps, when he had put the three hundred thousand francs in safety, it would be better to travel post, to fall at Chesnel’s feet, and tell him all.  But before they left the opera-house, the Duchess, in spite of herself, gave Victurnien an adorable glance, her eyes were shining with the desire to go back once more to bid farewell to the nest which she loved so much.  And boy that he was, he lost a night.

The next day, at three o’clock, he was back again at the Hotel de Maufrigneuse; he had come to take the Duchess’ orders for that night’s escape.  And, “Why should we go?” asked she; “I have thought it all out.  The Vicomtesse de Beauseant and the Duchesse de Langeais disappeared.  If I go too, it will be something quite commonplace.  We will brave the storm.  It will be a far finer thing to do.  I am sure of success.”  Victurnien’s eyes dazzled; he felt as if his skin were dissolving and the blood oozing out all over him.

“What is the matter with you?” cried the fair Diane, noticing a hesitation which a woman never forgives.  Your truly adroit lover will hasten to agree with any fancy that Woman may take into her head, and suggest reasons for doing otherwise, while leaving her free exercise of her right to change her mind, her intentions, and sentiments generally as often as she pleases.  Victurnien was angry for the first time, angry with the wrath of a weak man of poetic temperament; it was a storm of rain and lightning flashes, but no thunder followed.  The angel on whose faith he had risked more than his life, the honor of his house, was very roughly handled.

“So,” said she, “we have come to this after eighteen months of tenderness!  You are unkind, very unkind.  Go away!—­I do not want to see you again.  I thought that you loved me.  You do not.”

“I do not love you?” repeated he, thunderstruck by the reproach.

“No, monsieur.”

“And yet——­” he cried.  “Ah! if you but knew what I have just done for your sake!”

“And how have you done so much for me, monsieur?  As if a man ought not to do anything for a woman that has done so much for him.”

“You are not worthy to know it!” Victurnien cried in a passion of anger.

“Oh!”

After that sublime, “Oh!” Diane bowed her head on her hand and sat, still, cold, and implacable as angels naturally may be expected to do, seeing that they share none of the passions of humanity.  At the sight of the woman he loved in this terrible attitude, Victurnien forgot his danger.  Had he not just that moment wronged the most angelic creature on earth?  He longed for forgiveness, he threw himself before her, he kissed her feet, he pleaded, he wept.  Two whole hours the unhappy young man spent in all kinds of follies, only to meet the same cold face, while the great silent tears dropping one by one, were dried as soon as they fell lest the unworthy lover should try to wipe them away.  The Duchess was acting a great agony, one of those hours which stamp the woman who passes through them as something august and sacred.

Two more hours went by.  By this time the Count had gained possession of Diane’s hand; it felt cold and spiritless.  The beautiful hand, with all the treasures in its grasp, might have been supple wood; there was nothing of Diane in it; he had taken it, it had not been given to him.  As for Victurnien, the spirit had ebbed out of his frame, he had ceased to think.  He would not have seen the sun in heaven.  What was to be done?  What course should he take?  What resolution should he make?  The man who can keep his head in such circumstances must be made of the same stuff as the convict who spent the night in robbing the Bibliotheque Royale of its gold medals, and repaired to his honest brother in the morning with a request to melt down the plunder.  “What is to be done?” cried the brother.  “Make me some coffee,” replied the thief.  Victurnien sank into a bewildered stupor, darkness settled down over his brain.  Visions of past rapture flitted across the misty gloom like the figures that Raphael painted against a black background; to these he must bid farewell.  Inexorable and disdainful, the Duchess played with the tip of her scarf.  She looked in irritation at Victurnien from time to time; she coquetted with memories, she spoke to her lover of his rivals as if anger had finally decided her to prefer one of them to a man who could so change in one moment after twenty-eight months of love.

“Ah! that charming young Felix de Vandenesse, so faithful as he was to Mme. de Mortsauf, would never have permitted himself such a scene!  He can love, can de Vandenesse!  De Marsay, that terrible de Marsay, such a tiger as everyone thought him, was rough with other men; but like all strong men, he kept his gentleness for women.  Montriveau trampled the Duchesse de Langeais under foot, as Othello killed Desdemona, in a burst of fury which at any rate proved the extravagance of his love.  It was not like a paltry squabble.  There was rapture in being so crushed.  Little, fair-haired, slim, and slender men loved to torment women; they could only reign over poor, weak creatures; it pleased them to have some ground for believing that they were men.  The tyranny of love was their one chance of asserting their power.  She did not know why she had put herself at the mercy of fair hair.  Such men as de Marsay, Montriveau, and Vandenesse, dark-haired and well grown, had a ray of sunlight in their eyes.”

It was a storm of epigrams.  Her speeches, like bullets, came hissing past his ears.  Every word that Diane hurled at him was triple-barbed; she humiliated, stung, and wounded him with an art that was all her own, as half a score of savages can torture an enemy bound to a stake.

“You are mad!” he cried at last, at the end of his patience, and out he went in God knows what mood.  He drove as if he had never handled the reins before, locked his wheels in the wheels of other vehicles, collided with the curbstone in the Place Louis-Quinze, went he knew not whither.  The horse, left to its own devices, made a bolt for the stable along the Quai d’Orsay; but as he turned into the Rue de l’Universite, Josephin appeared to stop the runaway.

“You cannot go home, sir,” the old man said, with a scared face; “they have come with a warrant to arrest you.”

Victurnien thought that he had been arrested on the criminal charge, albeit there had not been time for the public prosecutor to receive his instructions.  He had forgotten the matter of the bills of exchange, which had been stirred up again for some days past in the form of orders to pay, brought by the officers of the court with accompaniments in the shape of bailiffs, men in possession, magistrates, commissaries, policemen, and other representatives of social order.  Like most guilty creatures, Victurnien had forgotten everything but his crime.

“It is all over with me,” he cried.

“No, M. le Comte, drive as fast as you can to the Hotel du Bon la Fontaine, in the Rue de Grenelle.  Mlle. Armande is waiting there for you, the horses have been put in, she will take you with her.”

Victurnien, in his trouble, caught like a drowning man at the branch that came to his hand; he rushed off to the inn, reached the place, and flung his arms about his aunt.  Mlle. Armande cried as if her heart would break; any one might have thought that she had a share in her nephew’s guilt.  They stepped into the carriage.  A few minutes later they were on the road to Brest, and Paris lay behind them.  Victurnien uttered not a sound; he was paralyzed.  And when aunt and nephew began to speak, they talked at cross purposes; Victurnien, still laboring under the unlucky misapprehension which flung him into Mlle. Armande’s arms, was thinking of his forgery; his aunt had the debts and the bills on her mind.

“You know all, aunt,” he had said.

“Poor boy, yes, but we are here.  I am not going to scold you just yet.  Take heart.”

“I must hide somewhere.”

“Perhaps. . . .  Yes, it is a very good idea.”

“Perhaps I might get into Chesnel’s house without being seen if we timed ourselves to arrive in the middle of the night?”

“That will be best.  We shall be better able to hide this from my brother.—­Poor angel! how unhappy he is!” said she, petting the unworthy child.

“Ah! now I begin to know what dishonor means; it has chilled my love.”

“Unhappy boy; what bliss and what misery!” And Mlle. Armande drew his fevered face to her breast and kissed his forehead, cold and damp though it was, as the holy women might have kissed the brow of the dead Christ when they laid Him in His grave clothes.  Following out the excellent scheme suggested by the prodigal son, he was brought by night to the quiet house in the Rue du Bercail; but chance ordered it that by so doing he ran straight into the wolf’s jaws, as the saying goes.  That evening Chesnel had been making arrangements to sell his connection to M. Lepressoir’s head-clerk.  M. Lepressoir was the notary employed by the Liberals, just as Chesnel’s practice lay among the aristocratic families.  The young fellow’s relatives were rich enough to pay Chesnel the considerable sum of a hundred thousand francs in cash.

Chesnel was rubbing his hands.  “A hundred thousand francs will go a long way in buying up debts,” he thought.  “The young man is paying a high rate of interest on his loans.  We will lock him up down here.  I will go yonder myself and bring those curs to terms.”

Chesnel, honest Chesnel, upright, worthy Chesnel, called his darling Comte Victurnien’s creditors “curs.”

Meanwhile his successor was making his way along the Rue du Bercail just as Mlle. Armande’s traveling carriage turned into it.  Any young man might be expected to feel some curiosity if he saw a traveling carriage stop at a notary’s door in such a town and at such an hour of the night; the young man in question was sufficiently inquisitive to stand in a doorway and watch.  He saw Mlle. Armande alight.

“Mlle. Armande d’Esgrignon at this time of night!” said he to himself.  “What can be going forward at the d’Esgrignons’?”

At the sight of mademoiselle, Chesnel opened the door circumspectly and set down the light which he was carrying; but when he looked out and saw Victurnien, Mlle. Armande’s first whispered word made the whole thing plain to him.  He looked up and down the street; it seemed quite deserted; he beckoned, and the young Count sprang out of the carriage and entered the courtyard.  All was lost.  Chesnel’s successor had discovered Victurnien’s hiding place.

Victurnien was hurried into the house and installed in a room beyond Chesnel’s private office.  No one could enter it except across the old man’s dead body.

“Ah!  M. le Comte!” exclaimed Chesnel, notary no longer.

“Yes, monsieur,” the Count answered, understanding his old friend’s exclamation.  “I did not listen to you; and now I have fallen into the depths, and I must perish.”

“No, no,” the good man answered, looking triumphantly from Mlle. Armande to the Count.  “I have sold my connection.  I have been working for a very long time now, and am thinking of retiring.  By noon to-morrow I shall have a hundred thousand francs; many things can be settled with that.  Mademoiselle, you are tired,” he added; “go back to the carriage and go home and sleep.  Business to-morrow.”

“Is he safe?” returned she, looking at Victurnien.

“Yes.”

She kissed her nephew; a few tears fell on his forehead.  Then she went.

“My good Chesnel,” said the Count, when they began to talk of business, “what are your hundred thousand francs in such a position as mine?  You do not know the full extent of my troubles, I think.”

Victurnien explained the situation.  Chesnel was thunderstruck.  But for the strength of his devotion, he would have succumbed to this blow.  Tears streamed from the eyes that might well have had no tears left to shed.  For a few moments he was a child again, for a few moments he was bereft of his senses; he stood like a man who should find his own house on fire, and through a window see the cradle ablaze and hear the hiss of the flames on his children’s curls.  He rose to his full height —­il se dressa en pied, as Amyot would have said; he seemed to grow taller; he raised his withered hands and wrung them despairingly and wildly.

“If only your father may die and never know this, young man!  To be a forger is enough; a parricide you must not be.  Fly, you say?  No.  They would condemn you for contempt of court!  Oh, wretched boy!  Why did you not forge my signature? I would have paid; I should not have taken the bill to the public prosecutor.—­Now I can do nothing.  You have brought me to a stand in the lowest pit in hell!—­Du Croisier!  What will come of it?  What is to be done?—­If you had killed a man, there might be some help for it.  But forgery—­forgery!  And time—­the time is flying,” he went on, shaking his fist towards the old clock.  “You will want a sham passport now.  One crime leads to another.  First,” he added, after a pause, “first of all we must save the house of d’Esgrignon.”

“But the money is still in Mme. de Maufrigneuse’s keeping,” exclaimed Victurnien.

“Ah!” exclaimed Chesnel.  “Well, there is some hope left—­a faint hope.  Could we soften du Croisier, I wonder, or buy him over?  He shall have all the lands if he likes.  I will go to him; I will wake him and offer him all we have.—­Besides, it was not you who forged that bill; it was I. I will go to jail; I am too old for the hulks, they can only put me in prison.”

“But the body of the bill is in my handwriting,” objected Victurnien, without a sign of surprise at this reckless devotion.

“Idiot! . . . that is, pardon, M. le Comte.  Josephin should have been made to write it,” the old notary cried wrathfully.  “He is a good creature; he would have taken it all on his shoulders.  But there is an end of it; the world is falling to pieces,” the old man continued, sinking exhausted into a chair.  “Du Croisier is a tiger; we must be careful not to rouse him.  What time is it?  Where is the draft?  If it is at Paris, it might be bought back from the Kellers; they might accommodate us.  Ah! but there are dangers on all sides; a single false step means ruin.  Money is wanted in any case.  But there! nobody knows you are here, you must live buried away in the cellar if needs must.  I will go at once to Paris as fast as I can; I can hear the mail coach from Brest.”

In a moment the old man recovered the faculties of his youth—­his agility and vigor.  He packed up clothes for the journey, took money, brought a six-pound loaf to the little room beyond the office, and turned the key on his child by adoption.

“Not a sound in here,” he said, “no light at night; and stop here till I come back, or you will go to the hulks.  Do you understand, M. le Comte?  Yes, to the hulks! if anybody in a town like this knows that you are here.”

With that Chesnel went out, first telling his housekeeper to give out that he was ill, to allow no one to come into the house, to send everybody away, and to postpone business of every kind for three days.  He wheedled the manager of the coach-office, made up a tale for his benefit—­he had the makings of an ingenious novelist in him—­and obtained a promise that if there should be a place, he should have it, passport or no passport, as well as a further promise to keep the hurried departure a secret.  Luckily, the coach was empty when it arrived.

In the middle of the following night Chesnel was set down in Paris.  At nine o’clock in the morning he waited on the Kellers, and learned that the fatal draft had returned to du Croisier three days since; but while obtaining this information, he in no way committed himself.  Before he went away he inquired whether the draft could be recovered if the amount were refunded.  Francois Keller’s answer was to the effect that the document was du Croisier’s property, and that it was entirely in his power to keep or return it.  Then, in desperation, the old man went to the Duchess.

Mme. de Maufrigneuse was not at home to any visitor at that hour.  Chesnel, feeling that every moment was precious, sat down in the hall, wrote a few lines, and succeeded in sending them to the lady by dint of wheedling, fascinating, bribing, and commanding the most insolent and inaccessible servants in the world.  The Duchess was still in bed; but, to the great astonishment of her household, the old man in black knee-breeches, ribbed stockings, and shoes with buckles to them, was shown into her room.

“What is it, monsieur?” she asked, posing in her disorder.  “What does he want of me, ungrateful that he is?”

“It is this, Mme. la Duchesse,” the good man exclaimed, “you have a hundred thousand crowns belonging to us.”

“Yes,” began she.  “What does it signify——?”

“The money was gained by a forgery, for which we are going to the hulks, a forgery which we committed for love of you,” Chesnel said quickly.  “How is it that you did not guess it, so clever as you are?  Instead of scolding the boy, you ought to have had the truth out of him, and stopped him while there was time, and saved him.”

At the first words the Duchess understood; she felt ashamed of her behavior to so impassioned a lover, and afraid besides that she might be suspected of complicity.  In her wish to prove that she had not touched the money left in her keeping, she lost all regard for appearances; and besides, it did not occur to her that the notary was a man.  She flung off the eider-down quilt, sprang to her desk (flitting past the lawyer like an angel out of one of the vignettes which illustrate Lamartine’s books), held out the notes, and went back in confusion to bed.

“You are an angel, madame.” (She was to be an angel for all the world, it seemed.) “But this will not be the end of it.  I count upon your influence to save us.”

“To save you!  I will do it or die!  Love that will not shrink from a crime must be love indeed.  Is there a woman in the world for whom such a thing has been done?  Poor boy!  Come, do not lose time, dear M. Chesnel; and count upon me as upon yourself.”

“Mme. la Duchesse!  Mme. la Duchesse!” It was all that he could say, so overcome was he.  He cried, he could have danced; but he was afraid of losing his senses, and refrained.

“Between us, we will save him,” she said, as he left the room.

Chesnel went straight to Josephin.  Josephin unlocked the young Count’s desk and writing-table.  Very luckily, the notary found letters which might be useful, letters from du Croisier and the Kellers.  Then he took a place in a diligence which was just about to start; and by dint of fees to the postilions, the lumbering vehicle went as quickly as the coach.  His two fellow-passengers on the journey happened to be in as great a hurry as himself, and readily agreed to take their meals in the carriage.  Thus swept over the road, the notary reached the Rue du Bercail, after three days of absence, an hour before midnight.  And yet he was too late.  He saw the gendarmes at the gate, crossed the threshold, and met the young Count in the courtyard.  Victurnien had been arrested.  If Chesnel had had the power, he would beyond a doubt have killed the officers and men; as it was, he could only fall on Victurnien’s neck.

“If I cannot hush this matter up, you must kill yourself before the indictment is made out,” he whispered.  But Victurnien had sunk into such stupor, that he stared back uncomprehendingly.

“Kill myself?” he repeated.

“Yes.  If your courage should fail, my boy, count upon me,” said Chesnel, squeezing Victurnien’s hand.

In spite of the anguish of mind and tottering limbs, he stood firmly planted, to watch the son of his heart, the Comte d’Esgrignon, go out of the courtyard between two gendarmes, with the commissary, the justice of the peace, and the clerk of the court; and not until the figures had disappeared, and the sound of footsteps had died away into silence, did he recover his firmness and presence of mind.

“You will catch cold, sir,” Brigitte remonstrated.

“The devil take you!” cried her exasperated master.

Never in the nine-and-twenty years that Brigitte had been in his service had she heard such words from him!  Her candle fell out of her hands, but Chesnel neither heeded his housekeeper’s alarm nor heard her exclaim.  He hurried off towards the Val-Noble.

“He is out of his mind,” said she; “after all, it is no wonder.  But where is he off to?  I cannot possibly go after him.  What will become of him?  Suppose that he should drown himself?”

And Brigitte went to waken the head-clerk and send him to look along the river bank; the river had a gloomy reputation just then, for there had lately been two cases of suicide—­one a young man full of promise, and the other a girl, a victim of seduction.  Chesnel went straight to the Hotel du Croisier.  There lay his only hope.  The law requires that a charge of forgery must be brought by a private individual.  It was still possible to withdraw if du Croisier chose to admit that there had been a misapprehension; and Chesnel had hopes, even then, of buying the man over.

M. and Mme. du Croisier had much more company than usual that evening.  Only a few persons were in the secret.  M. du Ronceret, president of the Tribunal; M. Sauvager, deputy Public Prosecutor; and M. du Coudrai, a registrar of mortgages, who had lost his post by voting on the wrong side, were the only persons who were supposed to know about it; but Mesdames du Ronceret and du Coudrai had told the news, in strict confidence, to one or two intimate friends, so that it had spread half over the semi-noble, semi-bourgeois assembly at M. du Croisier’s.  Everybody felt the gravity of the situation, but no one ventured to speak of it openly; and, moreover, Mme. du Croisier’s attachment to the upper sphere was so well known, that people scarcely dared to mention the disaster which had befallen the d’Esgrignons or to ask for particulars.  The persons most interested were waiting till good Mme. du Croisier retired, for that lady always retreated to her room at the same hour to perform her religious exercises as far as possible out of her husband’s sight.

Du Croisier’s adherents, knowing the secret and the plans of the great commercial power, looked round when the lady of the house disappeared; but there were still several persons present whose opinions or interests marked them out as untrustworthy, so they continued to play.  About half past eleven all had gone save intimates:  M. Sauvager, M. Camusot, the examining magistrate, and his wife, M. and Mme. du Ronceret and their son Fabien, M. and Mme. du Coudrai, and Joseph Blondet, the eldest of an old judge; ten persons in all.

It is told of Talleyrand that one fatal day, three hours after midnight, he suddenly interrupted a game of cards in the Duchesse de Luynes’ house by laying down his watch on the table and asking the players whether the Prince de Conde had any child but the Duc d’Enghien.

“Why do you ask?” returned Mme. de Luynes, “when you know so well that he has not.”

“Because if the Prince has no other son, the House of Conde is now at an end.”

There was a moment’s pause, and they finished the game.—­President du Ronceret now did something very similar.  Perhaps he had heard the anecdote; perhaps, in political life, little minds and great minds are apt to hit upon the same expression.  He looked at his watch, and interrupted the game of boston with: 

“At this moment M. le Comte d’Esgrignon is arrested, and that house which has held its head so high is dishonored forever.”

“Then, have you got hold of the boy?” du Coudrai cried gleefully.

Every one in the room, with the exception of the President, the deputy, and du Croisier, looked startled.

“He has just been arrested in Chesnel’s house, where he was hiding,” said the deputy public prosecutor, with the air of a capable but unappreciated public servant, who ought by rights to be Minister of Police.  M. Sauvager, the deputy, was a thin, tall young man of five-and-twenty, with a lengthy olive-hued countenance, black frizzled hair, and deep-set eyes; the wide, dark rings beneath them were completed by the wrinkled purple eyelids above.  With a nose like the beak of some bird of prey, a pinched mouth, and cheeks worn lean with study and hollowed by ambition, he was the very type of a second-rate personage on the lookout for something to turn up, and ready to do anything if so he might get on in the world, while keeping within the limitations of the possible and the forms of law.  His pompous expression was an admirable indication of the time-serving eloquence to be expected of him.  Chesnel’s successor had discovered the young Count’s hiding place to him, and he took great credit to himself for his penetration.

The news seemed to come as a shock to the examining magistrate, M. Camusot, who had granted the warrant of arrest on Sauvager’s application, with no idea that it was to be executed so promptly.  Camusot was short, fair, and fat already, though he was only thirty years old or thereabouts; he had the flabby, livid look peculiar to officials who live shut up in their private study or in a court of justice; and his little, pale, yellow eyes were full of the suspicion which is often mistaken for shrewdness.

Mme. Camusot looked at her spouse, as who should say, “Was I not right?”

“Then the case will come on,” was Camusot’s comment.

“Could you doubt it?” asked du Coudrai.  “Now they have got the Count, all is over.”

“There is the jury,” said Camusot.  “In this case M. le Prefet is sure to take care that after the challenges from the prosecution and the defence, the jury to a man will be for an acquittal.—­My advice would be to come to a compromise,” he added, turning to du Croisier.

“Compromise!” echoed the President; “why, he is in the hands of justice.”

“Acquitted or convicted, the Comte d’Esgrignon will be dishonored all the same,” put in Sauvager.

“I am bringing an action,”[] said du Croisier.  “I shall have Dupin senior.  We shall see how the d’Esgrignon family will escape out of his clutches.”

[] A trial for an offence of this kind in France is an action brought
    by a private person (partie civile) to recover damages, and at the
    same time a criminal prosecution conducted on behalf of the
    Government.—­Tr.

“The d’Esgrignons will defend the case and have counsel from Paris; they will have Berryer,” said Mme. Camusot.  “You will have a Roland for your Oliver.”

Du Croisier, M. Sauvager, and the President du Ronceret looked at Camusot, and one thought troubled their minds.  The lady’s tone, the way in which she flung her proverb in the faces of the eight conspirators against the house of d’Esgrignon, caused them inward perturbation, which they dissembled as provincials can dissemble, by dint of lifelong practice in the shifts of a monastic existence.  Little Mme. Camusot saw their change of countenance and subsequent composure when they scented opposition on the part of the examining magistrate.  When her husband unveiled the thoughts in the back of his own mind, she had tried to plumb the depths of hate in du Croisier’s adherents.  She wanted to find out how du Croisier had gained over this deputy public prosecutor, who had acted so promptly and so directly in opposition to the views of the central power.

“In any case,” continued she, “if celebrated counsel come down from Paris, there is a prospect of a very interesting session in the Court of Assize; but the matter will be snuffed out between the Tribunal and the Court of Appeal.  It is only to be expected that the Government should do all that can be done, below the surface, to save a young man who comes of a great family, and has the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse for a friend.  So I think that we shall have a ‘sensation at Landernau.’”

“How you go on, madame!” the President said sternly.  “Can you suppose that the Court of First Instance will be influenced by considerations which have nothing to do with justice?”

“The event proves the contrary,” she said meaningly, looking full at Sauvager and the President, who glanced coldly at her.

“Explain yourself, madame,” said Sauvager. “you speak as if we had not done our duty.”

“Mme. Camusot meant nothing,” interposed her husband.

“But has not M. le President just said something prejudicing a case which depends on the examination of the prisoner?” said she.  “And the evidence is still to be taken, and the Court had not given its decision?”

“We are not at the law-courts,” the deputy public prosecutor replied tartly; “and besides, we know all that.”

“But the public prosecutor knows nothing at all about it yet,” returned she, with an ironical glance.  “He will come back from the Chamber of Deputies in all haste.  You have cut out his work for him, and he, no doubt, will speak for himself.”

The deputy prosecutor knitted his thick bushy brows.  Those interested read tardy scruples in his countenance.  A great silence followed, broken by no sound but the dealing of the cards.  M. and Mme. Camusot, sensible of a decided chill in the atmosphere, took their departure to leave the conspirators to talk at their ease.

“Camusot,” the lady began in the street, “you went too far.  Why lead those people to suspect that you will have no part in their schemes?  They will play you some ugly trick.”

“What can they do?  I am the only examining magistrate.”

“Cannot they slander you in whispers, and procure your dismissal?”

At that very moment Chesnel ran up against the couple.  The old notary recognized the examining magistrate; and with the lucidity which comes of an experience of business, he saw that the fate of the d’Esgrignons lay in the hands of the young man before him.

“Ah, sir!” he exclaimed, “we shall soon need you badly.  Just a word with you.—­Your pardon, madame,” he added, as he drew Camusot aside.

Mme. Camusot, as a good conspirator, looked towards du Croisier’s house, ready to break up the conversation if anybody appeared; but she thought, and thought rightly, that their enemies were busy discussing this unexpected turn which she had given to the affair.  Chesnel meanwhile drew the magistrate into a dark corner under the wall, and lowered his voice for his companion’s ear.

“If you are for the house of d’Esgrignon,” he said, “Mme. la Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, the Prince of Cadignan, the Ducs de Navarreins and de Lenoncourt, the Keeper of the Seals, the Chancellor, the King himself, will interest themselves in you.  I have just come from Paris; I knew all about this; I went post-haste to explain everything at Court.  We are counting on you, and I will keep your secret.  If you are hostile, I shall go back to Paris to-morrow and lodge a complaint with the Keeper of the Seals that there is a suspicion of corruption.  Several functionaries were at du Croisier’s house to-night, and no doubt, ate and drank there, contrary to law; and besides, they are friends of his.”

Chesnel would have brought the Almighty to intervene if he had had the power.  He did not wait for an answer; he left Camusot and fled like a deer towards du Croisier’s house.  Camusot, meanwhile, bidden to reveal the notary’s confidences, was at once assailed with, “Was I not right, dear?”—­a wifely formula used on all occasions, but rather more vehemently when the fair speaker is in the wrong.  By the time they reached home, Camusot had admitted the superiority of his partner in life, and appreciated his good fortune in belonging to her; which confession, doubtless, was the prelude of a blissful night.

Chesnel met his foes in a body as they left du Croisier’s house, and began to fear that du Croisier had gone to bed.  In his position he was compelled to act quickly, and any delay was a misfortune.

“In the King’s name!” he cried, as the man-servant was closing the hall door.  He had just brought the King on the scene for the benefit of an ambitious little official, and the word was still on his lips.  He fretted and chafed while the door was unbarred; then, swift as a thunderbolt, dashed into the ante-chamber, and spoke to the servant.

“A hundred crowns to you, young man, if you can wake Mme. du Croisier and send her to me this instant.  Tell her anything you like.”

Chesnel grew cool and composed as he opened the door of the brightly lighted drawing-room, where du Croisier was striding up and down.  For a moment the two men scanned each other, with hatred and enmity, twenty years’ deep, in their eyes.  One of the two had his foot on the heart of the house of d’Esgrignon; the other, with a lion’s strength, came forward to pluck it away.

“Your humble servant, sir,” said Chesnel.  “Have you made the charge?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When was it made?”

“Yesterday.”

“Have any steps been taken since the warrant of arrest was issued?”

“I believe so.”

“I have come to treat with you.”

“Justice must take its course, nothing can stop it, the arrest has been made.”

“Never mind that, I am at your orders, at your feet.”  The old man knelt before du Croisier, and stretched out his hands entreatingly.

“What do you want?  Our lands, our castle?  Take all; withdraw the charge; leave us nothing but life and honor.  And over and besides all this, I will be your servant; command and I will obey.”

Du Croisier sat down in an easy-chair and left the old man to kneel.

“You are not vindictive,” pleaded Chesnel; “you are good-hearted, you do not bear us such a grudge that you will not listen to terms.  Before daylight the young man ought to be at liberty.”

“The whole town knows that he has been arrested,” returned du Croisier, enjoying his revenge.

“It is a great misfortune, but as there will be neither proofs nor trial, we can easily manage that.”

Du Croisier reflected.  He seemed to be struggling with self-interest; Chesnel thought that he had gained a hold on his enemy through the great motive of human action.  At that supreme moment Mme. du Croisier appeared.

“Come here and help me to soften your dear husband, madame?” said Chesnel, still on his knees.  Mme. du Croisier made him rise with every sign of profound astonishment.  Chesnel explained his errand; and when she knew it, the generous daughter of the intendants of the Ducs de Alencon turned to du Croisier with tears in her eyes.

“Ah! monsieur, can you hesitate?  The d’Esgrignons, the honor of the province!” she said.

“There is more in it than that,” exclaimed du Croisier, rising to begin his restless walk again.

“More?  What more?” asked Chesnel in amazement.

“France is involved, M. Chesnel!  It is a question of the country, of the people, of giving my lords your nobles a lesson, and teaching them that there is such a thing as justice, and law, and a bourgeoisie—­a lesser nobility as good as they, and a match for them!  There shall be no more trampling down half a score of wheat fields for a single hare; no bringing shame on families by seducing unprotected girls; they shall not look down on others as good as they are, and mock at them for ten whole years, without finding out at last that these things swell into avalanches, and those avalanches will fall and crush and bury my lords the nobles.  You want to go back to the old order of things.  You want to tear up the social compact, the Charter in which our rights are set forth—–­”

“And so?”

“Is it not a sacred mission to open the people’s eyes?” cried du Croisier.  “Their eyes will be opened to the morality of your party when they see nobles going to be tried at the Assize Court like Pierre and Jacques.  They will say, then, that small folk who keep their self-respect are as good as great folk that bring shame on themselves.  The Assize Court is a light for all the world.  Here, I am the champion of the people, the friend of law.  You yourselves twice flung me on the side of the people—­once when you refused an alliance, twice when you put me under the ban of your society.  You are reaping as you have sown.”

If Chesnel was startled by this outburst, so no less was Mme. du Croisier.  To her this was a terrible revelation of her husband’s character, a new light not merely on the past but on the future as well.  Any capitulation on the part of the colossus was apparently out of the question; but Chesnel in no wise retreated before the impossible.

“What, monsieur?” said Mme. du Croisier.  “Would you not forgive?  Then you are not a Christian.”

“I forgive as God forgives, madame, on certain conditions.”

“And what are they?” asked Chesnel, thinking that he saw a ray of hope.

“The elections are coming on; I want the votes at your disposal.”

“You shall have them.”

“I wish that we, my wife and I, should be received familiarly every evening, with an appearance of friendliness at any rate, by M. le Marquis d’Esgrignon and his circle,” continued du Croisier.

“I do not know how we are going to compass it, but you shall be received.”

“I wish to have the family bound over by a surety of four hundred thousand francs, and by a written document stating the nature of the compromise, so as to keep a loaded cannon pointed at its heart.”

“We agree,” said Chesnel, without admitting that the three hundred thousand francs was in his possession; “but the amount must be deposited with a third party and returned to the family after your election and repayment.”

“No; after the marriage of my grand-niece, Mlle. Duval.  She will very likely have four million francs some day; the reversion of our property (mine and my wife’s) shall be settled upon her by her marriage-contract, and you shall arrange a match between her and the young Count.”

“Never!”

“Never!” repeated du Croisier, quite intoxicated with triumph.  “Good-night!”

“Idiot that I am,” thought Chesnel, “why did I shrink from a lie to such a man?”

Du Croisier took himself off; he was pleased with himself; he had enjoyed Chesnel’s humiliation; he had held the destinies of a proud house, the representatives of the aristocracy of the province, suspended in his hand; he had set the print of his heel on the very heart of the d’Esgrignons; and, finally, he had broken off the whole negotiation on the score of his wounded pride.  He went up to his room, leaving his wife alone with Chesnel.  In his intoxication, he saw his victory clear before him.  He firmly believed that the three hundred thousand francs had been squandered; the d’Esgrignons must sell or mortgage all that they had to raise the money; the Assize Court was inevitable to his mind.

An affair of forgery can always be settled out of court in France if the missing amount is returned.  The losers by the crime are usually well-to-do, and have no wish to blight an imprudent man’s character.  But du Croisier had no mind to slacken his hold until he knew what he was about.  He meditated until he fell asleep on the magnificent manner in which his hopes would be fulfilled by the way of the Assize Court or by marriage.  The murmur of voices below, the lamentations of Chesnel and Mme. du Croisier, sounded sweet in his ears.

Mme. du Croisier shared Chesnel’s views of the d’Esgrignons.  She was a deeply religious woman, a Royalist attached to the noblesse; the interview had been in every way a cruel shock to her feelings.  She, a staunch Royalist, had heard the roaring of that Liberalism, which, in her director’s opinion, wished to crush the Church.  The Left benches for her meant the popular upheaval and the scaffolds of 1793.

“What would your uncle, that sainted man who hears us, say to this?” exclaimed Chesnel.  Mme. du Croisier made no reply, but the great tears rolled down her checks.

“You have already been the cause of one poor boy’s death; his mother will go mourning all her days,” continued Chesnel; he saw how his words told, but he would have struck harder and even broken this woman’s heart to save Victurnien.  “Do you want to kill Mlle. Armande, for she would not survive the dishonor of the house for a week?  Do you wish to be the death of poor Chesnel, your old notary?  For I shall kill the Count in prison before they shall bring the charge against him, and take my own life afterwards, before they shall try me for murder in an Assize Court.”

“That is enough! that is enough, my friend!  I would do anything to put a stop to such an affair; but I never knew M. du Croisier’s real character until a few minutes ago.  To you I can make the admission:  there is nothing to be done.”

“But what if there is?”

“I would give half the blood in my veins that it were so,” said she, finishing her sentence by a wistful shake of the head.

As the First Consul, beaten on the field of Marengo till five o’clock in the evening, by six o’clock saw the tide of battle turned by Desaix’s desperate attack and Kellermann’s terrific charge, so Chesnel in the midst of defeat saw the beginnings of victory.  No one but a Chesnel, an old notary, an ex-steward of the manor, old Maitre Sorbier’s junior clerk, in the sudden flash of lucidity which comes with despair, could rise thus, high as a Napoleon, nay, higher.  This was not Marengo, it was Waterloo, and the Prussians had come up; Chesnel saw this, and was determined to beat them off the field.

“Madame,” he said, “remember that I have been your man of business for twenty years; remember that if the d’Esgrignons mean the honor of the province, you represent the honor of the bourgeoisie; it rests with you, and you alone, to save the ancient house.  Now, answer me; are you going to allow dishonor to fall on the shade of your dead uncle, on the d’Esgrignons, on poor Chesnel?  Do you want to kill Mlle. Armande weeping yonder?  Or do you wish to expiate wrongs done to others by a deed which will rejoice your ancestors, the intendants of the dukes of Alencon, and bring comfort to the soul of our dear Abbe?  If he could rise from his grave, he would command you to do this thing that I beg of you upon my knees.”

“What is it?” asked Mme. du Croisier.

“Well.  Here are the hundred thousand crowns,” said Chesnel, drawing the bundles of notes from his pocket.  “Take them, and there will be an end of it.”

“If that is all,” she began, “and if no harm can come of it to my husband——­”

“Nothing but good,” Chesnel replied.  “You are saving him from eternal punishment in hell, at the cost of a slight disappointment here below.”

“He will not be compromised, will he?” she asked, looking into Chesnel’s face.

Then Chesnel read the depths of the poor wife’s mind.  Mme. du Croisier was hesitating between her two creeds; between wifely obedience to her husband as laid down by the Church, and obedience to the altar and the throne.  Her husband, in her eyes, was acting wrongly, but she dared not blame him; she would fain save the d’Esgrignons, but she was loyal to her husband’s interests.

“Not in the least,” Chesnel answered; “your old notary swears it by the Holy Gospels——­”

He had nothing left to lose for the d’Esgrignons but his soul; he risked it now by this horrible perjury, but Mme. du Croisier must be deceived, there was no other choice but death.  Without losing a moment, he dictated a form of receipt by which Mme. du Croisier acknowledged payment of a hundred thousand crowns five days before the fatal letter of exchange appeared; for he recollected that du Croisier was away from home, superintending improvements on his wife’s property at the time.

“Now swear to me that you will declare before the examining magistrate that you received the money on that date,” he said, when Mme. du Croisier had taken the notes and he held the receipt in his hand.

“It will be a lie, will it not?”

“Venial sin,” said Chesnel.

“I could not do it without consulting my director, M. l’Abbe Couturier.”

“Very well,” said Chesnel, “will you be guided entirely by his advice in this affair?”

“I promise that.”

“And you must not give the money to M. du Croisier until you have been before the magistrate.”

“No.  Ah!  God give me strength to appear in a Court of Justice and maintain a lie before men!”

Chesnel kissed Mme. du Croisier’s hand, then stood upright, and majestic as one of the prophets that Raphael painted in the Vatican.

“You uncle’s soul is thrilled with joy,” he said; “you have wiped out for ever the wrong that you did by marrying an enemy of altar and throne”—­words that made a lively impression on Mme. du Croisier’s timorous mind.

Then Chesnel all at once bethought himself that he must make sure of the lady’s director, the Abbe Couturier.  He knew how obstinately devout souls can work for the triumph of their views when once they come forward for their side, and wished to secure the concurrence of the Church as early as possible.  So he went to the Hotel d’Esgrignon, roused up Mlle. Armande, gave her an account of that night’s work, and sped her to fetch the Bishop himself into the forefront of the battle.

“Ah, God in heaven!  Thou must save the house of d’Esgrignon!” he exclaimed, as he went slowly home again.  “The affair is developing now into a fight in a Court of Law.  We are face to face with men that have passions and interests of their own; we can get anything out of them.  This du Croisier has taken advantage of the public prosecutor’s absence; the public prosecutor is devoted to us, but since the opening of the Chambers he has gone to Paris.  Now, what can they have done to get round his deputy?  They have induced him to take up the charge without consulting his chief.  This mystery must be looked into, and the ground surveyed to-morrow; and then, perhaps, when I have unraveled this web of theirs, I will go back to Paris to set great powers at work through Mme. de Maufrigneuse.”

So he reasoned, poor, aged, clear-sighted wrestler, before he lay down half dead with bearing the weight of so much emotion and fatigue.  And yet, before he fell asleep he ran a searching eye over the list of magistrates, taking all their secret ambitions into account, casting about for ways of influencing them, calculating his chances in the coming struggle.  Chesnel’s prolonged scrutiny of consciences, given in a condensed form, will perhaps serve as a picture of the judicial world in a country town.

Magistrates and officials generally are obliged to begin their career in the provinces; judicial ambition there ferments.  At the outset every man looks towards Paris; they all aspire to shine in the vast theatre where great political causes come before the courts, and the higher branches of the legal profession are closely connected with the palpitating interests of society.  But few are called to that paradise of the man of law, and nine-tenths of the profession are bound sooner or later to regard themselves as shelved for good in the provinces.  Wherefore, every Tribunal of First Instance and every Court-Royal is sharply divided in two.  The first section has given up hope, and is either torpid or content; content with the excessive respect paid to office in a country town, or torpid with tranquillity.  The second section is made up of the younger sort, in whom the desire of success is untempered as yet by disappointment, and of the really clever men urged on continually by ambition as with a goad; and these two are possessed with a sort of fanatical belief in their order.

At this time the younger men were full of Royalist zeal against the enemies of the Bourbons.  The most insignificant deputy official was dreaming of conducting a prosecution, and praying with all his might for one of those political cases which bring a man’s zeal into prominence, draw the attention of the higher powers, and mean advancement for King’s men.  Was there a member of an official staff of prosecuting counsel who could hear of a Bonapartist conspiracy breaking out somewhere else without a feeling of envy?  Where was the man that did not burn to discover a Caron, or a Berton, or a revolt of some sort?  With reasons of State, and the necessity of diffusing the monarchical spirit throughout France as their basis, and a fierce ambition stirred up whenever party spirit ran high, these ardent politicians on their promotion were lucid, clear-sighted, and perspicacious.  They kept up a vigorous detective system throughout the kingdom; they did the work of spies, and urged the nation along a path of obedience, from which it had no business to swerve.

Justice, thus informed with monarchical enthusiasm, atoned for the errors of the ancient parliaments, and walked, perhaps, too ostentatiously hand in hand with religion.  There was more zeal than discretion shown; but justice sinned not so much in the direction of machiavelism as by giving the candid expression to its views, when those views appeared to be opposed to the general interests of a country which must be put safely out of reach of revolutions.  But taken as a whole, there was still too much of the bourgeois element in the administration; it was too readily moved by petty liberal agitation; and as a result, it was inevitable that it should incline sooner or later to the Constitutional party, and join ranks with the bourgeoisie in the day of battle.  In the great body of legal functionaries, as in other departments of the administration, there was not wanting a certain hypocrisy, or rather that spirit of imitation which always leads France to model herself on the Court, and, quite unintentionally, to deceive the powers that be.

Officials of both complexions were to be found in the court in which young d’Esgrignon’s fate depended.  M. le President du Ronceret and an elderly judge, Blondet by name, represented the section of functionaries shelved for good, and resigned to stay where they were; while the young and ambitious party comprised the examining magistrate M. Camusot, and his deputy M. Michu, appointed through the interests of the Cinq-Cygnes, and certain of promotion to the Court of Appeal of Paris at the first opportunity.

President du Ronceret held a permanent post; it was impossible to turn him out.  The aristocratic party declined to give him what he considered to be his due, socially speaking; so he declared for the bourgeoisie, glossed over his disappointment with the name of independence, and failed to realize that his opinions condemned him to remain a president of a court of the first instance for the rest of his life.  Once started in this track the sequence of events led du Ronceret to place his hopes of advancement on the triumph of du Croisier and the Left.  He was in no better odor at the Prefecture than at the Court-Royal.  He was compelled to keep on good terms with the authorities; the Liberals distrusted him, consequently he belonged to neither party.  He was obliged to resign his chances of election to du Croisier, he exercised no influence, and played a secondary part.  The false position reacted on his character; he was soured and discontented; he was tired of political ambiguity, and privately had made up his mind to come forward openly as leader of the Liberal party, and so to strike ahead of du Croisier.  His behavior in the d’Esgrignon affair was the first step in this direction.  To begin with, he was an admirable representative of that section of the middle classes which allows its petty passions to obscure the wider interests of the country; a class of crotchety politicians, upholding the government one day and opposing it the next, compromising every cause and helping none; helpless after they have done the mischief till they set about brewing more; unwilling to face their own incompetence, thwarting authority while professing to serve it.  With a compound of arrogance and humility they demand of the people more submission than kings expect, and fret their souls because those above them are not brought down to their level, as if greatness could be little, as if power existed without force.

President du Ronceret was a tall, spare man with a receding forehead and scanty, auburn hair.  He was wall-eyed, his complexion was blotched, his lips thin and hard, his scarcely audible voice came out like the husky wheezings of asthma.  He had for a wife a great, solemn, clumsy creature, tricked out in the most ridiculous fashion, and outrageously overdressed.  Mme. la Presidente gave herself the airs of a queen; she wore vivid colors, and always appeared at balls adorned with the turban, dear to the British female, and lovingly cultivated in out-of-the-way districts in France.  Each of the pair had an income of four or five thousand francs, which with the President’s salary, reached a total of some twelve thousand.  In spite of a decided tendency to parsimony, vanity required that they should receive one evening in the week.  Du Croisier might import modern luxury into the town, M. and Mme. de Ronceret were faithful to the old traditions.  They had always lived in the old-fashioned house belonging to Mme. du Ronceret, and had made no changes in it since their marriage.  The house stood between a garden and a courtyard.  The gray old gable end, with one window in each story, gave upon the road.  High walls enclosed the garden and the yard, but the space taken up beneath them in the garden by a walk shaded with chestnut trees was filled in the yard by a row of outbuildings.  An old rust-devoured iron gate in the garden wall balanced the yard gateway, a huge, double-leaved carriage entrance with a buttress on either side, and a mighty shell on the top.  The same shell was repeated over the house-door.

The whole place was gloomy, close, and airless.  The row of iron-gated openings in the opposite wall, as you entered, reminded you of prison windows.  Every passer-by could look in through the railings to see how the garden grew; the flowers in the little square borders never seemed to thrive there.

The drawing-room on the ground floor was lighted by a single window on the side of the street, and a French window above a flight of steps, which gave upon the garden.  The dining-room on the other side of the great ante-chamber, with its windows also looking out into the garden, was exactly the same size as the drawing-room, and all three apartments were in harmony with the general air of gloom.  It wearied your eyes to look at the ceilings all divided up by huge painted crossbeams and adorned with a feeble lozenge pattern or a rosette in the middle.  The paint was old, startling in tint, and begrimed with smoke.  The sun had faded the heavy silk curtains in the drawing-room; the old-fashioned Beauvais tapestry which covered the white-painted furniture had lost all its color with wear.  A Louis Quinze clock on the chimney-piece stood between two extravagant, branched sconces filled with yellow wax candles, which the Presidente only lighted on occasions when the old-fashioned rock-crystal chandelier emerged from its green wrapper.  Three card-tables, covered with threadbare baize, and a backgammon box, sufficed for the recreations of the company; and Mme. du Ronceret treated them to such refreshments as cider, chestnuts, pastry puffs, glasses of eau sucree, and home-made orgeat.  For some time past she had made a practice of giving a party once a fortnight, when tea and some pitiable attempts at pastry appeared to grace the occasion.

Once a quarter the du Roncerets gave a grand three-course dinner, which made a great sensation in the town, a dinner served up in execrable ware, but prepared with the science for which the provincial cook is remarkable.  It was a Gargantuan repast, which lasted for six whole hours, and by abundance the President tried to vie with du Croisier’s elegance.

And so du Ronceret’s life and its accessories were just what might have been expected from his character and his false position.  He felt dissatisfied at home without precisely knowing what was the matter; but he dared not go to any expense to change existing conditions, and was only too glad to put by seven or eight thousand francs every year, so as to leave his son Fabien a handsome private fortune.  Fabien du Ronceret had no mind for the magistracy, the bar, or the civil service, and his pronounced turn for doing nothing drove his parent to despair.

On this head there was rivalry between the President and the Vice-President, old M. Blondet.  M. Blondet, for a long time past, had been sedulously cultivating an acquaintance between his son and the Blandureau family.  The Blandureaus were well-to-do linen manufacturers, with an only daughter, and it was on this daughter that the President had fixed his choice of a wife for Fabien.  Now, Joseph Blondet’s marriage with Mlle. Blandureau depended on his nomination to the post which his father, old Blondet, hoped to obtain for him when he himself should retire.  But President du Ronceret, in underhand ways, was thwarting the old man’s plans, and working indirectly upon the Blandureaus.  Indeed, if it had not been for this affair of young d’Esgrignon’s, the astute President might have cut them out, father and son, for their rivals were very much richer.

M. Blondet, the victim of the machiavelian President’s intrigues, was one of the curious figures which lie buried away in the provinces like old coins in a crypt.  He was at that time a man of sixty-seven or thereabouts, but he carried his years well; he was very tall, and in build reminded you of the canons of the good old times.  The smallpox had riddled his face with numberless dints, and spoilt the shape of his nose by imparting to it a gimlet-like twist; it was a countenance by no means lacking in character, very evenly tinted with a diffused red, lighted up by a pair of bright little eyes, with a sardonic look in them, while a certain sarcastic twitch of the purpled lips gave expression to that feature.

Before the Revolution broke out, Blondet senior had been a barrister; afterwards he became the public accuser, and one of the mildest of those formidable functionaries.  Goodman Blondet, as they used to call him, deadened the force of the new doctrines by acquiescing in them all, and putting none of them in practice.  He had been obliged to send one or two nobles to prison; but his further proceedings were marked with such deliberation, that he brought them through to the 9th Thermidor with a dexterity which won respect for him on all sides.  As a matter of fact, Goodman Blondet ought to have been President of the Tribunal, but when the courts of law were reorganized he had been set aside; Napoleon’s aversion for Republicans was apt to reappear in the smallest appointments under his government.  The qualification of ex-public accuser, written in the margin of the list against Blondet’s name, set the Emperor inquiring of Cambaceres whether there might not be some scion of an ancient parliamentary stock to appoint instead.  The consequence was that du Ronceret, whose father had been a councillor of parliament, was nominated to the presidency; but, the Emperor’s repugnance notwithstanding, Cambaceres allowed Blondet to remain on the bench, saying that the old barrister was one of the best jurisconsults in France.

Blondet’s talents, his knowledge of the old law of the land and subsequent legislation, should by rights have brought him far in his profession; but he had this much in common with some few great spirits:  he entertained a prodigious contempt for his own special knowledge, and reserved all his pretentions, leisure, and capacity for a second pursuit unconnected with the law.  To this pursuit he gave his almost exclusive attention.  The good man was passionately fond of gardening.  He was in correspondence with some of the most celebrated amateurs; it was his ambition to create new species; he took an interest in botanical discoveries, and lived, in short, in the world of flowers.  Like all florists, he had a predilection for one particular plant; the pelargonium was his especial favorite.  The court, the cases that came before it, and his outward life were as nothing to him compared with the inward life of fancies and abundant emotions which the old man led.  He fell more and more in love with his flower-seraglio; and the pains which he bestowed on his garden, the sweet round of the labors of the months, held Goodman Blondet fast in his greenhouse.  But for that hobby he would have been a deputy under the Empire, and shone conspicuous beyond a doubt in the Corps Legislatif.

His marriage was the second cause of his obscurity.  As a man of forty, he was rash enough to marry a girl of eighteen, by whom he had a son named Joseph in the first year of their marriage.  Three years afterwards Mme. Blondet, then the prettiest woman in the town, inspired in the prefect of the department a passion which ended only with her death.  The prefect was the father of her second son Emile; the whole town knew this, old Blondet himself knew it.  The wife who might have roused her husband’s ambition, who might have won him away from his flowers, positively encouraged the judge in his botanical tastes.  She no more cared to leave the place than the prefect cared to leave his prefecture so long as his mistress lived.

Blondet felt himself unequal at his age to a contest with a young wife.  He sought consolation in his greenhouse, and engaged a very pretty servant-maid to assist him to tend his ever-changing bevy of beauties.  So while the judge potted, pricked out, watered, layered, slipped, blended, and induced his flowers to break, Mme. Blondet spent his substance on the dress and finery in which she shone at the prefecture.  One interest alone had power to draw her away from the tender care of a romantic affection which the town came to admire in the end; and this interest was Emile’s education.  The child of love was a bright and pretty boy, while Joseph was no less heavy and plain-featured.  The old judge, blinded by paternal affection loved Joseph as his wife loved Emile.

For a dozen years M. Blondet bore his lot with perfect resignation.  He shut his eyes to his wife’s intrigue with a dignified, well-bred composure, quite in the style of an eighteenth century grand seigneur; but, like all men with a taste for a quiet life, he could cherish a profound dislike, and he hated his younger son.  When his wife died, therefore, in 1818, he turned the intruder out of the house, and packed him off to Paris to study law on an allowance of twelve hundred francs for all resource, nor could any cry of distress extract another penny from his purse.  Emile Blondet would have gone under if it had not been for his real father.

M. Blondet’s house was one of the prettiest in the town.  It stood almost opposite the prefecture, with a neat little court in front.  A row of old-fashioned iron railings between two brick-work piers enclosed it from the street; and a low wall, also of brick, with a second row of railings along the top, connected the piers with the neighboring house.  The little court, a space about ten fathoms in width by twenty in length, was cut in two by a brick pathway which ran from the gate to the house door between a border on either side.  Those borders were always renewed; at every season of the year they exhibited a successful show of blossom, to the admiration of the public.  All along the back of the gardenbeds a quantity of climbing plants grew up and covered the walls of the neighboring houses with a magnificent mantle; the brick-work piers were hidden in clusters of honeysuckle; and, to crown all, in a couple of terra-cotta vases at the summit, a pair of acclimatized cactuses displayed to the astonished eyes of the ignorant those thick leaves bristling with spiny defences which seem to be due to some plant disease.

It was a plain-looking house, built of brick, with brick-work arches above the windows, and bright green Venetian shutters to make it gay.  Through the glass door you could look straight across the house to the opposite glass door, at the end of a long passage, and down the central alley in the garden beyond; while through the windows of the dining-room and drawing-room, which extended, like the passage from back to front of the house, you could often catch further glimpses of the flower-beds in a garden of about two acres in extent.  Seen from the road, the brick-work harmonized with the fresh flowers and shrubs, for two centuries had overlaid it with mosses and green and russet tints.  No one could pass through the town without falling in love with a house with such charming surroundings, so covered with flowers and mosses to the roof-ridge, where two pigeons of glazed crockery ware were perched by way of ornament.

M. Blondet possessed an income of about four thousand livres derived from land, besides the old house in the town.  He meant to avenge his wrongs legitimately enough.  He would leave his house, his lands, his seat on the bench to his son Joseph, and the whole town knew what he meant to do.  He had made a will in that son’s favor; he had gone as far as the Code will permit a man to go in the way of disinheriting one child to benefit another; and what was more, he had been putting by money for the past fifteen years to enable his lout of a son to buy back from Emile that portion of his father’s estate which could not legally be taken away from him.

Emile Blondet thus turned adrift had contrived to gain distinction in Paris, but so far it was rather a name than a practical result.  Emile’s indolence, recklessness, and happy-go-lucky ways drove his real father to despair; and when that father died, a half-ruined man, turned out of office by one of the political reactions so frequent under the Restoration, it was with a mind uneasy as to the future of a man endowed with the most brilliant qualities.

Emile Blondet found support in a friendship with a Mlle. de Troisville, whom he had known before her marriage with the Comte de Montcornet.  His mother was living when the Troisvilles came back after the emigration; she was related to the family, distantly it is true, but the connection was close enough to allow her to introduce Emile to the house.  She, poor woman, foresaw the future.  She knew that when she died her son would lose both mother and father, a thought which made death doubly bitter, so she tried to interest others in him.  She encouraged the liking that sprang up between Emile and the eldest daughter of the house of Troisville; but while the liking was exceedingly strong on the young lady’s part, a marriage was out of the question.  It was a romance on the pattern of Paul et Virginie.  Mme. Blondet did what she could to teach her son to look to the Troisvilles, to found a lasting attachment on a children’s game of “make-believe” love, which was bound to end as boy-and-girl romances usually do.  When Mlle. de Troisville’s marriage with General Montcornet was announced, Mme. Blondet, a dying woman, went to the bride and solemnly implored her never to abandon Emile, and to use her influence for him in society in Paris, whither the General’s fortune summoned her to shine.

Luckily for Emile, he was able to make his own way.  He made his appearance, at the age of twenty, as one of the masters of modern literature; and met with no less success in the society into which he was launched by the father who at first could afford to bear the expense of the young man’s extravagance.  Perhaps Emile’s precocious celebrity and the good figure that he made strengthened the bonds of his friendship with the Countess.  Perhaps Mme. de Montcornet, with the Russian blood in her veins (her mother was the daughter of the Princess Scherbelloff), might have cast off the friend of her childhood if he had been a poor man struggling with all his might among the difficulties which beset a man of letters in Paris; but by the time that the real strain of Emile’s adventurous life began, their attachment was unalterable on either side.  He was looked upon as one of the leading lights of journalism when young d’Esgrignon met him at his first supper party in Paris; his acknowledged position in the world of letters was very high, and he towered above his reputation.  Goodman Blondet had not the faintest conception of the power which the Constitutional Government had given to the press; nobody ventured to talk in his presence of the son of whom he refused to hear.  And so it came to pass that he knew nothing of Emile whom he had cursed and Emile’s greatness.

Old Blondet’s integrity was as deeply rooted in him as his passion for flowers; he knew nothing but law and botany.  He would have interviews with litigants, listen to them, chat with them, and show them his flowers; he would accept rare seeds from them; but once on the bench, no judge on earth was more impartial.  Indeed, his manner of proceeding was so well known, that litigants never went near him except to hand over some document which might enlighten him in the performance of his duty, and nobody tried to throw dust in his eyes.  With his learning, his lights, and his way of holding his real talents cheap, he was so indispensable to President du Ronceret, that, matrimonial schemes apart, that functionary would have done all that he could, in an underhand way, to prevent the vice-president from retiring in favor of his son.  If the learned old man left the bench, the President would be utterly unable to do without him.

Goodman Blondet did not know that it was in Emile’s power to fulfil all his wishes in a few hours.  The simplicity of his life was worthy of one of Plutarch’s men.  In the evening he looked over his cases; next morning he worked among his flowers; and all day long he gave decisions on the bench.  The pretty maid-servant, now of ripe age, and wrinkled like an Easter pippin, looked after the house, and they lived according to the established customs of the strictest parsimony.  Mlle. Cadot always carried the keys of her cupboards and fruit-loft about with her.  She was indefatigable.  She went to market herself, she cooked and dusted and swept, and never missed mass of a morning.  To give some idea of the domestic life of the household, it will be enough to remark that the father and son never ate fruit till it was beginning to spoil, because Mlle. Cadot always brought out anything that would not keep.  No one in the house ever tasted the luxury of new bread, and all the fast days in the calendar were punctually observed.  The gardener was put on rations like a soldier; the elderly Valideh always kept an eye upon him.  And she, for her part, was so deferentially treated, that she took her meals with the family, and in consequence was continually trotting to and fro between the kitchen and the parlor at breakfast and dinner time.

Mlle. Blandureau’s parents had consented to her marriage with Joseph Blondet upon one condition—­the penniless and briefless barrister must be an assistant judge.  So, with the desire of fitting his son to fill the position, old M. Blondet racked his brains to hammer the law into his son’s head by dint of lessons, so as to make a cut-and-dried lawyer of him.  As for Blondet junior, he spent almost every evening at the Blandureaus’ house, to which also young Fabien du Ronceret had been admitted since his return, without raising the slightest suspicion in the minds of father or son.

Everything in this life of theirs was measured with an accuracy worthy of Gerard Dow’s Money Changer; not a grain of salt too much, not a single profit foregone; but the economical principles by which it was regulated were relaxed in favor of the greenhouse and garden.  “The garden was the master’s craze,” Mlle. Cadot used to say.  The master’s blind fondness for Joseph was not a craze in her eyes; she shared the father’s predilection; she pampered Joseph; she darned his stockings; and would have been better pleased if the money spent on the garden had been put by for Joseph’s benefit.

That garden was kept in marvelous order by a single man; the paths, covered with river-sand, continually turned over with the rake, meandered among the borders full of the rarest flowers.  Here were all kinds of color and scent, here were lizards on the walls, legions of little flower-pots standing out in the sun, regiments of forks and hoes, and a host of innocent things, a combination of pleasant results to justify the gardener’s charming hobby.

At the end of the greenhouse the judge had set up a grandstand, an amphitheatre of benches to hold some five or six thousand pelargoniums in pots—­a splendid and famous show.  People came to see his geraniums in flower, not only from the neighborhood, but even from the departments round about.  The Empress Marie Louise, passing through the town, had honored the curiously kept greenhouse with a visit; so much was she impressed with the sight, that she spoke of it to Napoleon, and the old judge received the Cross of the Legion of Honor.  But as the learned gardener never mingled in society at all, and went nowhere except to the Blandureaus, he had no suspicion of the President’s underhand manoeuvres; and others who could see the President’s intentions were far too much afraid of him to interfere or to warn the inoffensive Blondets.

As for Michu, that young man with his powerful connections gave much more thought to making himself agreeable to the women in the upper social circles to which he was introduced by the Cinq-Cygnes, than to the extremely simple business of a provincial Tribunal.  With his independent means (he had an income of twelve thousand livres), he was courted by mothers of daughters, and led a frivolous life.  He did just enough at the Tribunal to satisfy his conscience, much as a schoolboy does his exercises, saying ditto on all occasions, with a “Yes, dear President.”  But underneath the appearance of indifference lurked the unusual powers of the Paris law student who had distinguished himself as one of the staff of prosecuting counsel before he came to the provinces.  He was accustomed to taking broad views of things; he could do rapidly what the President and Blondet could only do after much thinking, and very often solved knotty points for them.  In delicate conjunctures the President and Vice-President took counsel with their junior, confided thorny questions to him, and never failed to wonder at the readiness with which he brought back a task in which old Blondet found nothing to criticise.  Michu was sure of the influence of the most crabbed aristocrats, and he was young and rich; he lived, therefore, above the level of departmental intrigues and pettinesses.  He was an indispensable man at picnics, he frisked with young ladies and paid court to their mothers, he danced at balls, he gambled like a capitalist.  In short, he played his part of young lawyer of fashion to admiration; without, at the same time, compromising his dignity, which he knew how to assert at the right moment like a man of spirit.  He won golden opinions by the manner in which he threw himself into provincial ways, without criticising them; and for these reasons, every one endeavored to make his time of exile endurable.

The public prosecutor was a lawyer of the highest ability; he had taken the plunge into political life, and was one of the most distinguished speakers on the ministerialist benches.  The President stood in awe of him; if he had not been away in Paris at the time, no steps would have been taken against Victurnien; his dexterity, his experience of business, would have prevented the whole affair.  At that moment, however, he was in the Chamber of Deputies, and the President and du Croisier had taken advantage of his absence to weave their plot, calculating, with a certain ingenuity, that if once the law stepped in, and the matter was noised abroad, things would have gone too far to be remedied.

As a matter of fact, no staff of prosecuting counsel in any Tribunal, at that particular time, would have taken up a charge of forgery against the eldest son of one of the noblest houses in France without going into the case at great length, and a special reference, in all probability, to the Attorney-General.  In such a case as this, the authorities and the Government would have tried endless ways of compromising and hushing up an affair which might send an imprudent young man to the hulks.  They would very likely have done the same for a Liberal family in a prominent position, so long as the Liberals were not too openly hostile to the throne and the altar.  So du Croisier’s charge and the young Count’s arrest had not been very easy to manage.  The President and du Croisier had compassed their ends in the following manner.

M. Sauvager, a young Royalist barrister, had reached the position of deputy public prosecutor by dint of subservience to the Ministry.  In the absence of his chief he was head of the staff of counsel for prosecution, and, consequently, it fell to him to take up the charge made by du Croisier.  Sauvager was a self-made man; he had nothing but his stipend; and for that reason the authorities reckoned upon some one who had everything to gain by devotion.  The President now exploited the position.  No sooner was the document with the alleged forgery in du Croisier’s hands, than Mme. la Presidente du Ronceret, prompted by her spouse, had a long conversation with M. Sauvager.  In the course of it she pointed out the uncertainties of a career in the magistrature debout compared with the magistrature assise, and the advantages of the bench over the bar; she showed how a freak on the part of some official, or a single false step, might ruin a man’s career.

“If you are conscientious and give your conclusions against the powers that be, you are lost,” continued she.  “Now, at this moment, you might turn your position to account to make a fine match that would put you above unlucky chances for the rest of your life; you may marry a wife with fortune sufficient to land you on the bench, in the magistrature assise.  There is a fine chance for you.  M. du Croisier will never have any children; everybody knows why.  His money, and his wife’s as well, will go to his niece, Mlle. Duval.  M. Duval is an ironmaster, his purse is tolerably filled, to begin with, and his father is still alive, and has a little property besides.  The father and son have a million of francs between them; they will double it with du Croisier’s help, for du Croisier has business connections among great capitalists and manufacturers in Paris.  M. and Mme. Duval the younger would be certain to give their daughter to a suitor brought forward by du Croisier, for he is sure to leave two fortunes to his niece; and, in all probability, he will settle the reversion of his wife’s property upon Mlle. Duval in the marriage contract, for Mme. du Croisier has no kin.  You know how du Croisier hates the d’Esgrignons.  Do him a service, be his man, take up this charge of forgery which he is going to make against young d’Esgrignon, and follow up the proceedings at once without consulting the public prosecutor at Paris.  And, then, pray Heaven that the Ministry dismisses you for doing your office impartially, in spite of the powers that be; for if they do, your fortune is made!  You will have a charming wife and thirty thousand francs a year with her, to say nothing of four millions expectations in ten years’ time.”

In two evenings Sauvager was talked over.  Both he and the President kept the affair a secret from old Blondet, from Michu, and from the second member of the staff of prosecuting counsel.  Feeling sure of Blondet’s impartiality on a question of fact, the President made certain of a majority without counting Camusot.  And now Camusot’s unexpected defection had thrown everything out.  What the President wanted was a committal for trial before the public prosecutor got warning.  How if Camusot or the second counsel for the prosecution should send word to Paris?

And here some portion of Camusot’s private history may perhaps explain how it came to pass that Chesnel took it for granted that the examining magistrate would be on the d’Esgrignons’ side, and how he had the boldness to tamper in the open street with that representative of justice.

Camusot’s father, a well-known silk mercer in the Rue des Bourdonnais, was ambitious for the only son of his first marriage, and brought him up to the law.  When Camusot junior took a wife, he gained with her the influence of an usher of the Royal cabinet, backstairs influence, it is true, but still sufficient, since it had brought him his first appointment as justice of the peace, and the second as examining magistrate.  At the time of his marriage, his father only settled an income of six thousand francs upon him (the amount of his mother’s fortune, which he could legally claim), and as Mlle. Thirion brought him no more than twenty thousand francs as her portion, the young couple knew the hardships of hidden poverty.  The salary of a provincial justice of the peace does not exceed fifteen hundred francs, while an examining magistrate’s stipend is augmented by something like a thousand francs, because his position entails expenses and extra work.  The post, therefore, is much coveted, though it is not permanent, and the work is heavy, and that was why Mme. Camusot had just scolded her husband for allowing the President to read his thoughts.

Marie Cecile Amelie Thirion, after three years of marriage, perceived the blessing of Heaven upon it in the regularity of two auspicious events—­the births of a girl and a boy; but she prayed to be less blessed in the future.  A few more of such blessings would turn straitened means into distress.  M. Camusot’s father’s money was not likely to come to them for a long time; and, rich as he was, he would scarcely leave more than eight or ten thousand francs a year to each of his children, four in number, for he had been married twice.  And besides, by the time that all “expectations,” as matchmakers call them, were realized, would not the magistrate have children of his own to settle in life?  Any one can imagine the situation for a little woman with plenty of sense and determination, and Mme. Camusot was such a woman.  She did not refrain from meddling in matters judicial.  She had far too strong a sense of the gravity of a false step in her husband’s career.

She was the only child of an old servant of Louis XVIII., a valet who had followed his master in his wanderings in Italy, Courland, and England, till after the Restoration the King awarded him with the one place that he could fill at Court, and made him usher by rotation to the royal cabinet.  So in Amelie’s home there had been, as it were, a sort of reflection of the Court.  Thirion used to tell her about the lords, and ministers, and great men whom he announced and introduced and saw passing to and fro.  The girl, brought up at the gates of the Tuileries, had caught some tincture of the maxims practised there, and adopted the dogma of passive obedience to authority.  She had sagely judged that her husband, by ranging himself on the side of the d’Esgrignons, would find favor with Mme. la Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and with two powerful families on whose influence with the King the Sieur Thirion could depend at an opportune moment.  Camusot might get an appointment at the first opportunity within the jurisdiction of Paris, and afterwards at Paris itself.  That promotion, dreamed of and longed for at every moment, was certain to have a salary of six thousand francs attached to it, as well as the alleviation of living in her own father’s house, or under the Camusots’ roof, and all the advantages of a father’s fortune on either side.  If the adage, “Out of sight is out of mind,” holds good of most women, it is particularly true where family feeling or royal or ministerial patronage is concerned.  The personal attendants of kings prosper at all times; you take an interest in a man, be it only a man in livery, if you see him every day.

Mme. Camusot, regarding herself as a bird of passage, had taken a little house in the Rue du Cygne.  Furnished lodgings there were none; the town was not enough of a thoroughfare, and the Camusots could not afford to live at an inn like M. Michu.  So the fair Parisian had no choice for it but to take such furniture as she could find; and as she paid a very moderate rent, the house was remarkably ugly, albeit a certain quaintness of detail was not wanting.  It was built against a neighboring house in such a fashion that the side with only one window in each story, gave upon the street, and the front looked out upon a yard where rose-bushes and buckhorn were growing along the wall on either side.  On the farther side, opposite the house, stood a shed, a roof over two brick arches.  A little wicket-gate gave entrance into the gloomy place (made gloomier still by the great walnut-tree which grew in the yard), but a double flight of steps, with an elaborately-wrought but rust-eaten handrail, led to the house door.  Inside the house there were two rooms on each floor.  The dining-room occupied that part of the ground floor nearest the street, and the kitchen lay on the other side of a narrow passage almost wholly taken up by the wooden staircase.  Of the two first-floor rooms, one did duty as the magistrate’s study, the other as a bedroom, while the nursery and the servants’ bedroom stood above in the attics.  There were no ceilings in the house; the cross-beams were simply white-washed and the spaces plastered over.  Both rooms on the first floor and the dining-room below were wainscoted and adorned with the labyrinthine designs which taxed the patience of the eighteenth century joiner; but the carving had been painted a dingy gray most depressing to behold.

The magistrate’s study looked as though it belonged to a provincial lawyer; it contained a big bureau, a mahogany armchair, a law student’s books, and shabby belongings transported from Paris.  Mme. Camusot’s room was more of a native product; it boasted a blue-and-white scheme of decoration, a carpet, and that anomalous kind of furniture which appears to be in the fashion, while it is simply some style that has failed in Paris.  As to the dining-room, it was nothing but an ordinary provincial dining-room, bare and chilly, with a damp, faded paper on the walls.

In this shabby room, with nothing to see but the walnut-tree, the dark leaves growing against the walls, and the almost deserted road beyond them, a somewhat lively and frivolous woman, accustomed to the amusements and stir of Paris, used to sit all day long, day after day, and for the most part of the time alone, though she received tiresome and inane visits which led her to think her loneliness preferable to empty tittle-tattle.  If she permitted herself the slightest gleam of intelligence, it gave rise to interminable comment and embittered her condition.  She occupied herself a great deal with her children, not so much from taste as for the sake of an interest in her almost solitary life, and exercised her mind on the only subjects which she could find —­to wit, the intrigues which went on around her, the ways of provincials, and the ambitions shut in by their narrow horizons.  So she very soon fathomed mysteries of which her husband had no idea.  As she sat at her window with a piece of intermittent embroidery work in her fingers, she did not see her woodshed full of faggots nor the servant busy at the wash tub; she was looking out upon Paris, Paris where everything is pleasure, everything is full of life.  She dreamed of Paris gaieties, and shed tears because she must abide in this dull prison of a country town.  She was disconsolate because she lived in a peaceful district, where no conspiracy, no great affair would ever occur.  She saw herself doomed to sit under the shadow of the walnut-tree for some time to come.

Mme. Camusot was a little, plump, fresh, fair-haired woman, with a very prominent forehead, a mouth which receded, and a turned-up chin, a type of countenance which is passable in youth, but looks old before the time.  Her bright, quick eyes expressed her innocent desire to get on in the world, and the envy born of her present inferior position, with rather too much candor; but still they lighted up her commonplace face and set it off with a certain energy of feeling, which success was certain to extinguish in later life.  At that time she used to give a good deal of time and thought to her dresses, inventing trimmings and embroidering them; she planned out her costumes with the maid whom she had brought with her from Paris, and so maintained the reputation of Parisiennes in the provinces.  Her caustic tongue was dreaded; she was not loved.  In that keen, investigating spirit peculiar to unoccupied women who are driven to find some occupation for empty days, she had pondered the President’s private opinions, until at length she discovered what he meant to do, and for some time past she had advised Camusot to declare war.  The young Count’s affair was an excellent opportunity.  Was it not obviously Camusot’s part to make a stepping-stone of this criminal case by favoring the d’Esgrignons, a family with power of a very different kind from the power of the du Croisier party?

“Sauvager will never marry Mlle. Duval.  They are dangling her before him, but he will be the dupe of those Machiavels in the Val-Noble to whom he is going to sacrifice his position.  Camusot, this affair, so unfortunate as it is for the d’Esgrignons, so insidiously brought on by the President for du Croisier’s benefit, will turn out well for nobody but you,” she had said, as they went in.

The shrewd Parisienne had likewise guessed the President’s underhand manoeuvres with the Blandureaus, and his object in baffling old Blondet’s efforts, but she saw nothing to be gained by opening the eyes of father or son to the perils of the situation; she was enjoying the beginning of the comedy; she knew about the proposals made by Chesnel’s successor on behalf of Fabien du Ronceret, but she did not suspect how important that secret might be to her.  If she or her husband were threatened by the President, Mme. Camusot could threaten too, in her turn, to call the amateur gardener’s attention to a scheme for carrying off the flower which he meant to transplant into his house.

Chesnel had not penetrated, like Mme. Camusot, into the means by which Sauvager had been won over; but by dint of looking into the various lives and interests of the men grouped about the Lilies of the Tribunal, he knew that he could count upon the public prosecutor, upon Camusot, and M. Michu.  Two judges for the d’Esgrignons would paralyze the rest.  And, finally, Chesnel knew old Blondet well enough to feel sure that if he ever swerved from impartiality, it would be for the sake of the work of his whole lifetime,—­to secure his son’s appointment.  So Chesnel slept, full of confidence, on the resolve to go to M. Blondet and offer to realize his so long cherished hopes, while he opened his eyes to President du Ronceret’s treachery.  Blondet won over, he would take a peremptory tone with the examining magistrate, to whom he hoped to prove that if Victurnien was not blameless, he had been merely imprudent; the whole thing should be shown in the light of a boy’s thoughtless escapade.

But Chesnel slept neither soundly nor for long.  Before dawn he was awakened by his housekeeper.  The most bewitching person in this history, the most adorable youth on the face of the globe, Mme. la Duchesse de Maufrigneuse herself, in man’s attire, had driven alone from Paris in a caleche, and was waiting to see him.

“I have come to save him or to die with him,” said she, addressing the notary, who thought that he was dreaming.  “I have brought a hundred thousand francs, given me by His Majesty out of his private purse, to buy Victurnien’s innocence, if his adversary can be bribed.  If we fail utterly, I have brought poison to snatch him away before anything takes place, before even the indictment is drawn up.  But we shall not fail.  I have sent word to the public prosecutor; he is on the road behind me; he could not travel in my caleche, because he wished to take the instructions of the Keeper of the Seals.”

Chesnel rose to the occasion and played up to the Duchess; he wrapped himself in his dressing-gown, fell at her feet, and kissed them, not without asking her pardon for forgetting himself in his joy.

“We are saved!” cried he; and gave orders to Brigitte to see that Mme. la Duchesse had all that she needed after traveling post all night.  He appealed to the fair Diane’s spirit, by making her see that it was absolutely necessary that she should visit the examining magistrate before daylight, lest any one should discover the secret, or so much as imagine that the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse had come.

“And have I not a passport in due form?” quoth she, displaying a sheet of paper, wherein she was described as M. le Vicomte Felix de Vandeness, Master of Requests, and His Majesty’s private secretary.  “And do I not play my man’s part well?” she added, running her fingers through her wig a la Titus, and twirling her riding switch.

“O!  Mme. la Duchesse, you are an angel!” cried Chesnel, with tears in his eyes. (She was destined always to be an angel, even in man’s attire.) “Button up your greatcoat, muffle yourself up to the eyes in your traveling cloak, take my arm, and let us go as quickly as possible to Camusot’s house before anybody can meet us.”

“Then am I going to see a man called Camusot?” she asked.

“With a nose to match his name,”[] assented Chesnel.

[] Camus, flat-nosed

The old notary felt his heart dead within him, but he thought it none the less necessary to humor the Duchess, to laugh when she laughed, and shed tears when she wept; groaning in spirit, all the same, over the feminine frivolity which could find matter for a jest while setting about a matter so serious.  What would he not have done to save the Count?  While Chesnel dressed; Mme. de Maufrigneuse sipped the cup of coffee and cream which Brigitte brought her, and agreed with herself that provincial women cooks are superior to Parisian chefs, who despise the little details which make all the difference to an epicure.  Thanks to Chesnel’s taste for delicate fare, Brigitte was found prepared to set an excellent meal before the Duchess.

Chesnel and his charming companion set out for M. and Mme. Camusot’s house.

“Ah! so there is a Mme. Camusot?” said the Duchess.  “Then the affair may be managed.”

“And so much the more readily, because the lady is visibly tired enough of living among us provincials; she comes from Paris,” said Chesnel.

“Then we must have no secrets from her?”

“You will judge how much to tell or to conceal,” Chesnel replied humbly.  “I am sure that she will be greatly flattered to be the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse’s hostess; you will be obliged to stay in her house until nightfall, I expect, unless you find it inconvenient to remain.”

“Is this Mme. Camusot a good-looking woman?” asked the Duchess, with a coxcomb’s air.

“She is a bit of a queen in her own house.”

“Then she is sure to meddle in court-house affairs,” returned the Duchess.  “Nowhere but in France, my dear M. Chesnel, do you see women so much wedded to their husbands that they are wedded to their husband’s professions, work, or business as well.  In Italy, England, and Germany, women make it a point of honor to leave men to fight their own battles; they shut their eyes to their husbands’ work as perseveringly as our French citizens’ wives do all that in them lies to understand the position of their joint-stock partnership; is not that what you call it in your legal language?  Frenchwomen are so incredibly jealous in the conduct of their married life, that they insist on knowing everything; and that is how, in the least difficulty, you feel the wife’s hand in the business; the Frenchwoman advises, guides, and warns her husband.  And, truth to tell, the man is none the worse off.  In England, if a married man is put in prison for debt for twenty-four hours, his wife will be jealous and make a scene when he comes back.”

“Here we are, without meeting a soul on the way,” said Chesnel.  “You are the more sure of complete ascendency here, Mme. la Duchesse, since Mme. Camusot’s father is one Thirion, usher of the royal cabinet.”

“And the King never thought of that!” exclaimed the Duchess.  “He thinks of nothing!  Thirion introduced us, the Prince de Cadignan, M. de Vandeness, and me!  We shall have it all our own way in this house.  Settle everything with M. Camusot while I talk to his wife.”

The maid, who was washing and dressing the children, showed the visitors into the little fireless dining-room.

“Take that card to your mistress,” said the Duchess, lowering her voice for the woman’s ear; “nobody else is to see it.  If you are discreet, child, you shall not lose by it.”

At the sound of a woman’s voice, and the sight of the handsome young man’s face, the maid looked thunderstruck.

“Wake M. Camusot,” said Chesnel, “and tell him, that I am waiting to see him on important business,” and she departed upstairs forthwith.

A few minutes later Mme. Camusot, in her dressing-gown, sprang downstairs and brought the handsome stranger into her room.  She had pushed Camusot out of bed and into his study with all his clothes, bidding him dress himself at once and wait there.  The transformation scene had been brought about by a bit of pasteboard with the words MADAME LA DUCHESSE DE MAUFRIGNEUSE engraved upon it.  A daughter of the usher of the royal cabinet took in the whole situation at once.

“Well!” exclaimed the maid-servant, left with Chesnel in the dining-room, “Would not any one think that a thunderbolt had dropped in among us?  The master is dressing in his study; you can go upstairs.”

“Not a word of all this, mind,” said Chesnel.

Now that he was conscious of the support of a great lady who had the King’s consent (by word of mouth) to the measures about to be taken for rescuing the Comte d’Esgrignon, he spoke with an air of authority, which served his cause much better with Camusot than the humility with which he would otherwise have approached him.

“Sir,” said he, “the words let fall last evening may have surprised you, but they are serious.  The house of d’Esgrignon counts upon you for the proper conduct of investigations from which it must issue without a spot.”

“I shall pass over anything in your remarks, sir, which must be offensive to me personally, and obnoxious to justice; for your position with regard to the d’Esgrignons excuses you up to a certain point, but——­”

“Pardon me, sir, if I interrupt you,” said Chesnel.  “I have just spoken aloud the things which your superiors are thinking and dare not avow; though what those things are any intelligent man can guess, and you are an intelligent man.—­Grant that the young man had acted imprudently, can you suppose that the sight of a d’Esgrignon dragged into an Assize Court can be gratifying to the King, the Court, or the Ministry?  Is it to the interest of the kingdom, or of the country, that historic houses should fall?  Is not the existence of a great aristocracy, consecrated by time, a guarantee of that Equality which is the catchword of the Opposition at this moment?  Well and good; now not only has there not been the slightest imprudence, but we are innocent victims caught in a trap.”

“I am curious to know how,” said the examining magistrate.

“For the last two years, the Sieur du Croisier has regularly allowed M. le Comte d’Esgrignon to draw upon him for very large sums,” said Chesnel.  “We are going to produce drafts for more than a hundred thousand crowns, which he continually met; the amounts being remitted by me—­bear that well in mind—­either before or after the bills fell due.  M. le Comte d’Esgrignon is in a position to produce a receipt for the sum paid by him, before this bill, this alleged forgery was drawn.  Can you fail to see in that case that this charge is a piece of spite and party feeling?  And a charge brought against the heir of a great house by one of the most dangerous enemies of the Throne and Altar, what is it but an odious slander?  There has been no more forgery in this affair than there has been in my office.  Summon Mme. du Croisier, who knows nothing as yet of the charge of forgery; she will declare to you that I brought the money and paid it over to her, so that in her husband’s absence she might remit the amount for which he has not asked her.  Examine du Croisier on the point; he will tell you that he knows nothing of my payment to Mme. du Croisier.

“You may make such assertions as these, sir, in M. d’Esgrignon’s salon, or in any other house where people know nothing of business, and they may be believed; but no examining magistrate, unless he is a driveling idiot, can imagine that a woman like Mme. du Croisier, so submissive as she is to her husband, has a hundred thousand crowns lying in her desk at this moment, without saying a word to him; nor yet that an old notary would not have advised M. du Croisier of the deposit on his return to town.”

“The old notary, sir, had gone to Paris to put a stop to the young man’s extravagance.”

“I have not yet examined the Comte d’Esgrignon,” Camusot began; “his answers will point out my duty.”

“Is he in close custody?”

“Yes.”

“Sir,” said Chesnel, seeing danger ahead, “the examination can be made in our interests or against them.  But there are two courses open to you:  you can establish the fact on Mme. du Croisier’s deposition that the amount was deposited with her before the bill was drawn; or you can examine the unfortunate young man implicated in this affair, and he in his confusion may remember nothing and commit himself.  You will decide which is the more credible—­a slip of memory on the part of a woman in her ignorance of business, or a forgery committed by a d’Esgrignon.”

“All this is beside the point,” began Camusot; “the question is, whether M. le Comte d’Esgrignon has or has not used the lower half of a letter addressed to him by du Croisier as a bill of exchange.”

“Eh! and so he might,” a voice cried suddenly, as Mme. Camusot broke in, followed by the handsome stranger, “so he might when M. Chesnel had advanced the money to meet the bill——­”

She leant over her husband.

“You will have the first vacant appointment as assistant judge at Paris, you are serving the King himself in this affair; I have proof of it; you will not be forgotten,” she said, lowering her voice in his ear.  “This young man that you see here is the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse; you must never have seen her, and do all that you can for the young Count boldly.”

“Gentlemen,” said Camusot, “even if the preliminary examination is conducted to prove the young Count’s innocence, can I answer for the view the court may take?  M. Chesnel, and you also, my sweet, know what M. le President wants.”

“Tut, tut, tut!” said Mme. Camusot, “go yourself to M. Michu this morning, and tell him that the Count has been arrested; you will be two against two in that case, I will be bound. Michu comes from Paris, and you know he is devoted to the noblesse.  Good blood cannot lie.”

At that very moment Mlle. Cadot’s voice was heard in the doorway.  She had brought a note, and was waiting for an answer.  Camusot went out, and came back again to read the note aloud: 

“M. le Vice-President begs M. Camusot to sit in audience to-day and for the next few days, so that there may be a quorum during M. le President’s absence.”

“Then there is an end of the preliminary examination!” cried Mme. Camusot.  “Did I not tell you, dear, that they would play you some ugly trick?  The President has gone off to slander you to the public prosecutor and the President of the Court-Royal.  You will be changed before you can make the examination.  Is that clear?”

“You will stay, monsieur,” said the Duchess.  “The public prosecutor is coming, I hope, in time.”

“When the public prosecutor arrives,” little Mme. Camusot said, with some heat, “he must find all over.—­Yes, my dear, yes,” she added, looking full at her amazed husband.—­“Ah! old hypocrite of a President, you are setting your wits against us; you shall remember it!  You have a mind to help us to a dish of your own making, you shall have two served up to you by your humble servant Cecile Amelie Thirion!—­Poor old Blondet!  It is lucky for him that the President has taken this journey to turn us out, for now that great oaf of a Joseph Blondet will marry Mlle. Blandureau.  I will let Father Blondet have some seeds in return.—­As for you, Camusot, go to M. Michu’s, while Mme. la Duchesse and I will go to find old Blondet.  You must expect to hear it said all over the town to-morrow that I took a walk with a lover this morning.”

Mme. Camusot took the Duchess’ arm, and they went through the town by deserted streets to avoid any unpleasant adventure on the way to the old Vice-President’s house.  Chesnel meanwhile conferred with the young Count in prison; Camusot had arranged a stolen interview.  Cook-maids, servants, and the other early risers of a country town, seeing Mme. Camusot and the Duchess taking their way through the back streets, took the young gentleman for an adorer from Paris.  That evening, as Cecile Amelie had said, the news of her behavior was circulated about the town, and more than one scandalous rumor was occasioned thereby.  Mme. Camusot and her supposed lover found old Blondet in his greenhouse.  He greeted his colleague’s wife and her companion, and gave the charming young man a keen, uneasy glance.

“I have the honor to introduce one of my husband’s cousins,” said Mme. Camusot, bringing forward the Duchess; “he is one of the most distinguished horticulturists in Paris; and as he cannot spend more than one day with us, on his way back from Brittany, and has heard of your flowers and plants, I have taken the liberty of coming early.”

“Oh, the gentleman is a horticulturist, is he?” said the old Blondet.

The Duchess bowed.

“This is my coffee-plant,” said Blondet, “and here is a tea-plant.”

“What can have taken M. le President away from home?” put in Mme. Camusot.  “I will wager that his absence concerns M. Camusot.”

“Exactly.—­This, monsieur, is the queerest of all cactuses,” he continued, producing a flower-pot which appeared to contain a piece of mildewed rattan; “it comes from Australia.  You are very young, sir, to be a horticulturist.”

“Dear M. Blondet, never mind your flowers,” said Mme. Camusot. “You are concerned, you and your hopes, and your son’s marriage with Mlle. Blandureau.  You are duped by the President.”

“Bah!” said old Blondet, with an incredulous air.

“Yes,” retorted she.  “If you cultivated people a little more and your flowers a little less, you would know that the dowry and the hopes you have sown, and watered, and tilled, and weeded are on the point of being gathered now by cunning hands.”

“Madame!——­”

“Oh, nobody in the town will have the courage to fly in the President’s face and warn you.  I, however, do not belong to the town, and, thanks to this obliging young man, I shall soon be going back to Paris; so I can inform you that Chesnel’s successor has made formal proposals for Mlle. Claire Blandureau’s hand on behalf of young du Ronceret, who is to have fifty thousand crowns from his parents.  As for Fabien, he has made up his mind to receive a call to the bar, so as to gain an appointment as judge.”

Old Blondet dropped the flower-pot which he had brought out for the Duchess to see.

“Oh, my cactus!  Oh, my son! and Mlle. Blandureau! . . .  Look here! the cactus flower is broken to pieces.”

“No,” Mme. Camusot answered, laughing; “everything can be put right.  If you have a mind to see your son a judge in another month, we will tell you how you must set to work——­”

“Step this way, sir, and you will see my pelargoniums, an enchanting sight while they are in flower——­” Then he added to Mme. Camusot, “Why did you speak of these matters while your cousin was present.”

“All depends upon him,” riposted Mme. Camusot.  “Your son’s appointment is lost for ever if you let fall a word about this young man.”

“Bah!”

“The young man is a flower——­”

“Ah!”

“He is the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, sent here by His Majesty to save young d’Esgrignon, whom they arrested yesterday on a charge of forgery brought against him by du Croisier.  Mme. la Duchesse has authority from the Keeper of the Seals; he will ratify any promises that she makes to us——­”

“My cactus is all right!” exclaimed Blondet, peering at his precious plant.—­“Go on, I am listening.”

“Take counsel with Camusot and Michu to hush up the affair as soon as possible, and your son will get the appointment.  It will come in time enough to baffle du Ronceret’s underhand dealings with the Blandureaus.  Your son will be something better than assistant judge; he will have M. Camusot’s post within the year.  The public prosecutor will be here to-day.  M. Sauvager will be obliged to resign, I expect, after his conduct in this affair.  At the court my husband will show you documents which completely exonerate the Count and prove that the forgery was a trap of du Croisier’s own setting.”

Old Blondet went into the Olympic circus where his six thousand pelargoniums stood, and made his bow to the Duchess.

“Monsieur,” said he, “if your wishes do not exceed the law, this thing may be done.”

“Monsieur,” returned the Duchess, “send in your resignation to M. Chesnel to-morrow, and I will promise you that your son shall be appointed within the week; but you must not resign until you have had confirmation of my promise from the public prosecutor.  You men of law will come to a better understanding among yourselves.  Only let him know that the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse had pledged her word to you.  And not a word as to my journey hither,” she