← catalogue

Conscience — Complete

by Hector Malot · English · Gutenberg #3990 · 497,875 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Conscience — Complete
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Conscience — Complete

Author: Hector Malot


        
Release date: October 30, 2004 [eBook #3990]
                Most recently updated: January 9, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3990

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONSCIENCE — COMPLETE ***



Produced by David Widger





CONSCIENCE

By Hector Malot


With a Preface by EDOUARD PAILLERON, of the French Academy




HECTOR MALOT

HECTOR-HENRI MALOT, the son of a notary public, was born at La Brouille
(Seine-Inferieure), March 20, 1830. He studied law, intending to devote
himself also to the Notariat, but toward 1853 or 1854 commenced writing
for various small journals. Somewhat later he assisted in compiling the
‘Biographie Generale’ of Firmin Didot, and was also a contributor to
some reviews. Under the generic title of ‘Les Victimes d’Amour,’ he made
his debut with the following three family-romances: ‘Les Amants (1859),
Les Epoux (1865), and Les Enfants (1866).’ About the same period he
published a book, ‘La Vie Moderne en Angleterre.’ Malot has written
quite a number of novels, of which the greatest is ‘Conscience,’ crowned
by the French Academy in 1878.

His works have met with great success in all countries. They possess
that lasting interest which attends all work based on keen observation
and masterly analysis of the secret motives of human actions.

The titles of his writings run as follows: ‘Les Amours de Jacques
(1868); Un Beau Frere (1869); Romain Kalbris (1864), being a romance
for children; Une Bonne Afaire, and Madame Obernin (1870); Un Cure de
Province (1872); Un Mariage sons le Second Empire (1873); Une Belle
Mere (1874); L’Auberge du Monde (1875-1876, 4 vols.); Les Batailles
du Mariage (1877, 3 vols.); Cara (1877); Le Docteur Claude (1879); Le
Boheme Tapageuse (1880, 3 vols.); Pompon, and Une Femme d’Argent (1881);
La Petite Soeur, and Les Millions Honteux (1882); Les Besogneux, and
Paulette (1883); Marichette, and Micheline (1884.); Le Lieutenant
Bonnet, and Sang Bleu (1885); Baccara, and Zyte (1886); Viceo Francis,
Seduction, and Ghislaine (1887); Mondaine (1888); Mariage Riche, and
Justice (1889); Mere (1890), Anie (1891); Complices (1892); Conscience
(1893); and Amours de Jeunes et Amours de Vieux (1894).’

About this time Hector Malot resolved not to write fiction any more.
He announced this determination in a card published in the journal, ‘Le
Temps,’ May 25, 1895--It was then maliciously stated that “M. Malot his
retired from business after having accumulated a fortune.” However, he
took up his pen again and published a history of his literary life:
Le Roman de mes Romans (1896); besides two volumes of fiction, L’Amour
dominateur (1896), and Pages choisies (1898), works which showed that,
in the language of Holy Writ, “his eye was not dimmed nor his natural
force abated,” and afforded him a triumph over his slanderers.

                  EDOUARD PAILLERON
               de l’Academie Francaise.




CONSCIENCE




BOOK 1.




CHAPTER I. THE REUNION

When Crozat, the Bohemian, escaped from poverty, by a good marriage that
made him a citizen of the Rue de Vaugirard, he did not break with his
old comrades; instead of shunning them, or keeping them at a distance,
he took pleasure in gathering them about him, glad to open his house to
them, the comforts of which were very different from the attic of the
Rue Ganneron, that he had occupied for so long a time.

Every Wednesday, from four to seven o’clock, he had a reunion at his
house, the Hotel des Medicis, and it was a holiday for which his friends
prepared themselves. When a new idea occurred to one of the habitues it
was caressed, matured, studied in solitude, in order to be presented in
full bloom at the assembly.

Crozat’s reception of his friends was pleasing, simple, like the man,
cordial on the part of the husband, as well as on the part of the wife,
who, having been an actress, held to the religion of comradeship: On a
table were small pitchers of beer and glasses; within reach was an old
stone jar from Beauvais, full of tobacco. The beer was good, the tobacco
dry, and the glasses were never empty.

And it was not silly subjects that were discussed here, worldly
babblings, or gossiping about absent friends, but the great questions
that ruled humanity: philosophy, politics, society, and religion.

Formed at first of friends, or, at least, of comrades who had worked and
suffered together, these reunions had enlarged gradually, until one day
the rooms at the Hotel des Medicis became a ‘parlotte’ where preachers
of ideas and of new religions, thinkers, reformers, apostles,
politicians, aesthetes, and even babblers in search of ears more or less
complaisant that would listen to them, met together. Any one might come
who wished, and if one did not enter there exactly as one would enter an
ordinary hotel, it was sufficient to be brought by an habitue in order
to have the right to a pipe, some beer, and to speak.

One of the habitues, Brigard, was a species of apostle, who had acquired
celebrity by practising in his daily life the ideas that he professed
and preached. Comte de Brigard by birth, he began by renouncing his
title, which made him a vassal of the respect of men and of social
conventions; an instructor of law, he could easily have made a thousand
or twelve hundred francs a month, but he arranged the number and the
price of his lessons so that each day brought him only ten francs in
order that he might not be a slave to money; living with a woman whom he
loved, he had always insisted, although he had two daughters, on
living with her ‘en union libre’, and in not acknowledging his children
legally, because the law debased the ties which attached him to them and
lessened his duties; it was conscience that sanctioned these duties; and
nature, like conscience, made him the most faithful of lovers, the best,
the most affectionate, the most tender of fathers. Tall, proud, carrying
in his person and manners the native elegance of his race, he dressed
like the porter at the corner, only replacing the blue velvet by
chestnut velvet, a less frivolous color. Living in Clamart for twenty
years, he always came to Paris on foot, and the only concessions that he
made to conventionality or to his comfort were to wear sabots in winter,
and to carry his vest on his arm in summer.

Thus organized, he must have disciples, and he sought them
everywhere--in the streets, where he buttonholed those he was able to
snatch under the trees of the Luxembourg Gardens, and on Wednesday
at the house of his old comrade Crozat. How many he had had! But,
unfortunately, the greater number turned out badly. Several became
ministers; others accepted high government positions for life; some
handled millions of francs; two were at Noumea; one preached in the
pulpit of Notre Dame.

One afternoon in October the little parlor was full; the end of the
summer vacation had brought back the habitues, and for the first time
the number was nearly large enough to open a profitable discussion.
Crozat, near the door, smiled at the arrivals on shaking hands, and
Brigard, his soft felt hat on his head, presided, assisted by his two
favorite disciples of the moment, the advocate Nougarede and the poet
Glady, neither of whom would turn out badly, he was certain.

To tell the truth, for those who knew how to look and to see, the pale
face of Nougarede, his thin lips, restless eyes, and an austerity of
dress and manners which clashed with his twenty-six years, gave him more
the appearance of a man of ambition than of an apostle. And when one
knew that Glady was the owner of a beautiful house in Paris, and of real
estate in the country that brought him a hundred thousand francs a year,
it was difficult to imagine that he would long follow Father Brigard.

But to see was not the dominant faculty of Brigard; it was to reason,
and reason told him that ambition would soon make Nougarede a deputy,
as fortune would one day make Glady an academician; and in that case,
although he detested assemblies as much as academies, they would then
have two tribunes whence the good word would fall on the multitude with
more weight. They might be counted on. When Nougarede began to come
to the Wednesday reunions he was as empty as a drum, and if he spoke
brilliantly on no matter what subject with an imperturbable eloquence,
it was to say nothing. In Glady’s first volume were words learnedly
arranged to please the ears and the eyes. Now, ideas sustained the
discourse of the advocate, as the verses of the poet said something--and
these ideas were Brigard’s; this something was the perfume of his
teaching.

For half an hour the pipes burned fiercely, the smoke slowly rose to
the ceiling, and as in a cloud Brigard might be seen like a bearded god,
proclaiming his law, his hat on his head; for, if he had made a rule
never to take it off, he manipulated it continually while he spoke,
frequently pushing it forward, sometimes to the back of his head, to
the right, to the left, raising it, and flattening it, according to the
needs of his argument.

“It is incontestable,” he said, “that we scatter our great force when we
ought to concentrate it.”

He pressed down his hat.

“In effect,” he raised it, “the hour has arrived for us to assert
ourselves as a group, and it is a duty for us, since it is a need of
humanity--”

At this moment a new arrival glided into the room quietly, with the
manifest intention of disturbing no one; but Crozat, who was seated near
the door, stopped him and shook hands.

“‘Tiens’, Saniel! Good-day, doctor.”

“Good-evening, my dear sir.”

“Come to the table; the beer is good to-day.”

“Thank you; I am very well here.”

Without taking the chair that Crozat designated, he leaned against the
wall. He was a tall, solid man about thirty, with tawny hair falling
on the collar of his coat, a long, curled beard, a face energetic, but
troubled and wan, to which the pale blue eyes gave an expression of
hardness that was accentuated by a prominent jaw and a decided air. A
Gaul, a true Gaul of ancient times, strong, bold, and resolute.

Brigard continued:

“It is incontestable”--this was his formula, because everything he
said was incontestable to him, simply because he said it--“it is
incontestable that in the struggle for existence the dogma of conscience
must be established, its only sanction being the performance of duty and
inward satisfaction--”

“Duty accomplished toward whom?” interrupted Saniel.

“Toward one’s self.”

“Then begin by stating what are our duties, and codify what is good and
what is bad.”

“That is easy,” some one replied.

“Easy if you admit a certain innate regard for human life, for property,
and for the family. But you must acknowledge that not all men have this
regard. How many believe that it is not a fault to run away with the
wife of a friend, not a crime to appropriate something that they want,
or to kill an enemy! Where are the duties of those who reason and feel
in this way? What is their inward satisfaction worth? This is why I will
not admit that conscience is the proper guide of our actions.”

There were several exclamations at this, which Brigard checked.

“What guide, then, shall men obey?” he demanded.

“Force, which is the last word of the philosophy of life!”

“That which leads to a wise and progressive extermination. Is this what
you desire?”

“Why not? I do not shrink from an extermination that relieves humanity
of idlers that it drags about without power to advance or to free
itself, finally sinking under the load. Is it not better for the world
to be rid of such people, who obstruct the advancement of others?”

“At least the idea is bizarre coming from a doctor,” interrupted Crozat,
“since it would put an end to hospitals.”

“Not at all; I would preserve them for the study of monsters.”

“In placing society on this antagonistic footing,” said Brigard,
“you destroy society itself, which is founded on reciprocity, on good
fellowship; and in doing so you can create for the strong a state
of suspicion that paralyzes them. Carthage and Venice practised the
selection by force, and destroyed themselves.”

“You speak of force, my dear Saniel,” interrupted a voice; “where do
you get that--the force of things, the tatum? There is no beginning, no
will; events decide for us climate, temperament, environment.”

“Then,” replied Saniel, “there is no responsibility, and this instrument
conscience, that should decide everything, is good for nothing. You need
not consider consequences. Success or defeat may yet be immaterial,
for the accomplishment of an act that you have believed condemnable
may serve the race, while another that you have believed beneficent may
prove injurious; from which it follows that intentions only should be
judged, and that no one but God can sound human hearts to their depths.”

He began to laugh.

“Do you believe that? Is that the conclusion at which you have arrived?”

A waiter entered, carrying pitchers of beer on a tray, and the
discussion was necessarily interrupted, every one drawing up to the
table where Crozat filled the glasses, and the conversation took a more
private turn.

Saniel shook hands with Brigard, who received him somewhat coldly; then
he approached Glady with the manifest intention of detaining him, but
Glady had said that he was obliged to leave, so Saniel said that he
could remain no longer, and had only dropped in on passing.

When they were both gone Brigard turned to Crozat and Nougarede, who
were near him, and declared that Saniel made him uneasy.

“He believes himself stronger than life,” he said, “because he is sound
and intelligent. He must take care that he does not go too far!”




CHAPTER II. THE RICH MAN’S REFUSAL

When Saniel and Glady reached the street, the rain that had fallen since
morning had ceased, and the asphalt shone clear and glittering like a
mirror.

“The walking is good,” Saniel remarked.

“It will rain again,” responded Glady, looking at the sky.

“I think not.” It was evident that Glady wished to take a cab, but as
none passed he was obliged to walk with Saniel.

“Do you know,” he said, “that you have wounded Brigard?”

“I regret it sincerely; but the salon of our friend Crozat is not yet a
church, and I do not suppose that discussion is forbidden there.”

“To deny is not to discuss.”

“You say that as if you were angry with me.”

“Not at all. I am sorry that you have wounded Brigard--nothing more.”

“That is too much, because I have a sincere esteem, a real friendship
for you, if you will permit me to say so.”

But Glady, apparently, did not desire the conversation to take this
turn.

“I think this is an empty cab,” he said, as a fiacre approached them.

“No,” replied Saniel, “I see the light of a cigar through the
windowpane.”

Glady made a slight gesture of impatience that was not lost upon Saniel,
who was expecting some such demonstration.

Rich, and frequenting the society of poor men, Glady lived in dread of
borrowers. It was enough for any man to appear to wish to talk to him
privately to make him believe that he was going to ask for fifty louis
or twenty francs; so often was this the case that every friend or
comrade was an enemy against whom he must defend his purse. And so he
lay in wait as if expecting some one to spring upon him, his eyes open,
his ears listening, and his hands in his pockets. This explains his
attitude toward Saniel, in whom he scented a demand for money, and
was the reason for his attempt to escape by taking a cab. But luck was
against him, and he tried to decline the unspoken request in another
way.

“Do not be surprised,” he said, with the volubility with which a man
speaks when he does not wish to give his companion a chance to say a
word, “that I was pained to see Brigard take seriously an argument that
evidently was not directed against him.”

“Neither against him nor against his ideas.”

“I know that; you do not need to defend yourself. But I have so much
friendship, so much esteem and respect for Brigard that everything that
touches him affects me. And how could it be otherwise when one knows his
value, and what a man he is? This life of mediocrity that he lives, in
order to be free, is it not admirable? What a beautiful example!”

“Not every one can follow it.”

“You think that one cannot be contented with ten francs a day?”

“I mean that not every one has the chance to make ten francs a day.”

The vague fears of Glady became definite at these words. They had walked
down the Rue Ferou and reached the Place St. Sulpice.

“I think that at last I am going to find a cab,” he said, precipitately.

But this hope was not realized; there was not a single cab at the
station, and he was forced to submit to the assault from Saniel.

And Saniel began:

“You are compelled to walk with me, and, frankly, I rejoice, because I
wish to talk to you of a serious affair--on which depends my future.”

“This is a poor place for serious talk.”

“I do not find it so.”

“We would better appoint some other time.”

“Why should we, since chance has thrown us together here?”

Glady resigned himself to the inevitable, and was as polite as he could
be in the circumstances.

“I await your pleasure,” he said in a gracious tone, that was a contrast
to his former one.

Saniel, who was in such a hurry a few moments before, now silently
walked by Glady, whose eyes were on the shining asphalt pavement.

At last he spoke.

“I have told you that my future depends on the affair concerning which
I wish to speak to you. I can tell you all in a few words: If I am
not able to procure three thousand francs within two days, I shall be
obliged to leave Paris, to give up my studies and my work here, and go
and bury myself in my native town and become a plain country doctor.”

Glady did not flinch; if he had not foreseen the amount he expected the
demand, and he continued gazing at his feet.

“You know,” continued Saniel, “that I am the son of peasants; my father
was marshal in a poor village of Auvergne. At school I gave proof of a
certain aptitude for work above my comrades, and our cure conceived
an affection for me and taught me all he knew. Then he made me enter
a small seminary. But I had neither the docile mind nor the submissive
character that was necessary for this education, and after several years
of pranks and punishments, although I was not expelled, I was given to
understand that my departure would be hailed with delight. I then became
usher in a small school, but without salary, taking board and lodging
as payment. I passed a good examination and was preparing for my degree,
when I left the school owing to a quarrel. I had made some money by
giving private lessons, and I found myself the possessor of nearly
eighty francs. I started for Paris, where I arrived at five o’clock
one morning in June, and where I knew, no one. I had a small trunk
containing a few shirts, which obliged me to take a carriage. I told the
coachman to take me to a hotel in the Latin Quarter. ‘Which hotel?’ he
asked; ‘I do not care,’ I answered. ‘Do you wish to go to the Hotel du
Senat?’ The name pleased me; perhaps it was an omen. He took me to the
Hotel du Senat, where, with what I had left of my eighty francs, I paid
a month in advance. I stayed there eight years.”

“That is remarkable.”

“What else could I do? I knew Latin and Greek as well as any man in
France, but as far as anything else was concerned I was as ignorant as
a schoolmaster. The same day I tried to make use of what I knew, and I
went to a publisher of classic books, of whom I had heard my professor
of Greek literature speak. After questioning me he gave me a copy of
Pindar to prepare with Latin notes, and advanced me thirty francs, which
lasted me a month. I came to Paris with the desire to work, but without
having made up my mind what to do. I went wherever there were lectures,
to the Sorbonne, to the College de France, to the Law School, and to the
School of Medicine; but it was a month before I came to a decision. The
subtleties of law displeased me, but the study of medicine, depending
upon the observation of facts, attracted me, and I decided to become a
doctor.”

“A marriage of reason.”

“No, a marriage for love. Because, if I had consulted reason, it would
have told me that to marry medicine when one has nothing--neither family
to sustain you nor relatives to push you--would be to condemn yourself
to a life of trials, of battles, and of misery. My student life was
happy; I worked hard, and by giving lessons in Latin I had enough to
eat. When I received as house-surgeon six, eight, nine hundred francs,
I thought it a large fortune, and I would have remained in this position
for the rest of my life if I had been able to do so, but when I took my
degree of doctor I was obliged to leave the hospital. The possessor of
several thousand francs, I should have followed rigorously my dream of
ambition. While attending the mistress of one of my comrades I made the
acquaintance of an upholsterer, who suggested that he should furnish
an apartment for me, and that I might pay him later. I yielded to
temptation. Remember, I had passed eight years in the Hotel du Senat,
and I knew nothing of Paris life. A home of my own! My own furniture,
and a servant in my anteroom! I should be somebody! My upholsterer could
have installed me in his own quarter of Paris, and perhaps could have
obtained some patients for me among his customers, who are rich and
fashionable. But he did not do this, probably concluding that with my
awkward appearance I would not be a success with such people. When you
are successful it is original to be a peasant--people find you clever;
but before success comes to you it is a disgrace. He furnished me an
apartment in a very respectable house in the Rue Louis-le-Grand. When I
went into it I had debts to the amount of ten thousand francs behind me,
the interest on this sum, the rent of two thousand four hundred francs,
not a sou in my pocket, not a relative--”

“That was courageous.”

“I did not know that in Paris everything is accomplished through
influence, and I imagined that an intelligent man could make his way
without assistance. I was to learn by experience. When a new doctor
arrives anywhere his brother doctors do not receive him with much
sympathy. ‘What does this intruder want?’ ‘Are there not enough of us
already?’ He is watched, and the first patient that he loses is made
use of as an example of his ignorance or imprudence, and his position
becomes uncomfortable. The chemists of my quarter whom I called upon
did not receive me very warmly; they made me feel the distance that
separates an honorable merchant from a beggar, and I was given to
understand that they could patronize me only on condition that I ordered
the specialties that they wished to profit by--iron from this one and
tar from that. On commencing to practise I had as patients only the
people of the quarter, whose principle was never to pay a doctor, and
who wait for the arrival of a new one in order that they may be rid of
the old one and this sort is numerous everywhere. It happened that my
concierge was from Auvergne like myself, and he considered it his duty
to make me give free attendance to all those from our country that
he could find in the quarter and everywhere else, so that I had the
patriotic satisfaction of seeing all the charcoal-dealers from Auvergne
sprawling in my beautiful armchairs. Finally, by remaining religiously
at home every Sunday in summer, while the other doctors were away, by
rising quickly at night every time my bell rang, I was able to acquire
a practice among a class of people who were more reasonable and
satisfactory. I obtained a prize at the Academy. At the same time I
delivered, at a moderate price, lectures in anatomy at schools on the
outskirts of the city; I gave lessons; I undertook all the anonymous
work of the book trade and of journalism that I could find. I slept five
hours a day, and in four years I had decreased my debt seven thousand
francs. If my upholsterer wished to be paid I could have it arranged,
but that was not his intention. He wishes to take his furniture that is
not worn out, and to keep the money that he has received. If I do not
pay these three thousand francs in a few days I shall be turned into
the street. To tell the truth, I shall soon have a thousand francs, but
those who owe it to me are not in Paris, or will pay in January. Behold
my situation! I am desperate because there is no one to whom I can
apply; those whom I have asked for money have not listened to me; I
have told you that I have no relatives, and neither have I any
friends--perhaps because I am not amiable. And then I thought of you.
You know me. You know that people say I have a future before me. At the
end of three months I shall be a doctor in the hospitals; my competitors
admit that I shall not miss admission; I have undertaken some
experiments that will, perhaps, give me fame. Will you give me your
hand?”

Glady extended it toward him. “I thank you for having applied to me; it
is a proof of confidence that touches me.” He pressed the hand that he
had taken with some warmth. “I see that you have divined the sentiments
of esteem with which you have inspired me.”

Saniel drew a long breath.

“Unfortunately,” continued Glady, “I cannot do what you desire without
deviating from my usual line of conduct. When I started out in life I
lent to all those who appealed to me, and when I did not lose my friends
I lost my money. I then took an oath to refuse every one. It is an oath
that I cannot break. What would my old friends say if they learned that
I did for a young man what I have refused to do for them?”

“Who would know it?”

“My conscience.”

They had reached the Quai Voltaire, where fiacres were stationed.

“At last here are some cabs,” Glady said. “Pardon me for leaving you,
but I am in a hurry.”




CHAPTER III. A LAST RESORT

Gady entered the cab so quickly that Saniel remained staring at the
sidewalk, slightly dazed. It was only when the door closed that he
understood.

“His conscience!” he murmured. “Behold them! Tartufes!”

After a moment of hesitation, he continued his way and reached the
bridge of Saints-Peres, but he walked with doubtful steps, like a man
who does not know where he is going. Presently he stopped, and, leaning
his arms on the parapet, watched the sombre, rapidly flowing Seine, its
small waves fringed with white foam. The rain had ceased, but the wind
blew in squalls, roughening the surface of the river and making the
red and green lights of the omnibus boats sway in the darkness. The
passers-by came and went, and more than one examined him from the corner
of the eye, wondering what this tall man was doing there, and if he
intended to throw himself into the water.

And why not? What better could he do?

And this was what Saniel said to himself while watching the flowing
water. One plunge, and he would end the fierce battle in which he had so
madly engaged for four years, and which would in the end drive him mad.

It was not the first time that this idea of ending everything had
tempted him, and he only warded it off by constantly inventing
combinations which it seemed to him at the moment might save him. Why
yield to such a temptation before trying everything? And this was how he
happened to appeal to Glady. But he knew him, and knew that his avarice,
about which every one joked, had a certain reason for its existence.
However, he said to himself that if the landed proprietor obstinately
refused a friendly loan, which would only pay the debts of youth,
the poet would willingly fill the role of Providence and save from
shipwreck, without risking anything, a man with a future, who, later,
would pay him back. It was with this hope that he risked a refusal.
The landed proprietor replied; the poet was silent. And now there was
nothing to expect from any one. Glady was his last resort.

In explaining his situation to Glady he lightened the misery instead of
exaggerating it. For it was not only his upholsterer that he owed, but
also his tailor, his bootmaker, his coal-dealer, his concierge, and
all those with whom he had dealings. In reality, his creditors had not
harassed him very much until lately, but this state of affairs would
not last when they saw him prosecuted; they also would sue him, and how
could he defend himself? How should he live? His only resource would be
to return to the Hotel du Senat, where even they would not leave him in
peace, or to his native town and become a country doctor. In either case
it was renouncing all his ambitions. Would it not be better to die?

What good was life if his dreams were not realized--if he had nothing
that he wanted?

Like many who frequently come in contact with death, life in itself
was a small thing to him--his own life as well as that of others; with
Hamlet he said: “To die, to sleep, no more,” but without adding: “To
die, to sleep, perchance to dream,” feeling certain that the dead do not
dream; and what is better than sleep to those who have had a hard life?

He was absorbed in thought when something came between him and the
flaring gaslight, and threw a shadow over him that made him straighten
himself up. What was it? Only a policeman, who came and leaned against
the parapet near him.

He understood. His attitude was that of a man who contemplates throwing
himself into the river, and the policeman had placed himself there in
order to prevent it.

“Thanks!” he said to the astonished man.

He continued his way, walking quickly, but hearing distinctly the steps
of the policeman following him, who evidently took him for a madman who
must be watched.

When he left the bridge of Saints-Peres for the Place du Carrousel this
surveillance ceased, and he could then indulge freely in reflection--at
least as freely as his trouble and discouragement permitted.

“The weak kill themselves; the strong fight to their last breath.”

And, low as he was, he was not yet at his last breath.

When he decided to appeal to Glady he had hesitated between him and a
usurer named Caffie, whom he did not know personally, but whom he had
heard spoken of as a rascal who was interested in all sorts of
affairs, preferring the bad to the good--of successions, marriages,
interdictions, extortions; and if he had not been to him it was for fear
of being refused, as much as from the dread of putting himself in such
hands in case of meeting with compliance. But these scruples and these
fears were useless now; since Glady failed him, cost what it might and
happen what would, he must go to this scamp for assistance.

He knew that Caffie lived in the Rue Sainte-Anne, but he did not know
the number. He had only to go to one of his patients, a wine-merchant
in the Rue Therese, to find his address in the directory. It was but
a step, and he decided to run the risk; there was need of haste.
Discouraged by all the applications that he had made up to this time,
disheartened by betrayed hopes, irritated by rebuffs, he did not deceive
himself as to the chances of this last attempt, but at least he would
try it, slight though the hope of success might be.

It was an old house where Caffie lived, and had been formerly a private
hotel; it was composed of two wings, one on the street, the other on an
inside court. A porte cochere gave access to this court, and under its
roof, near the staircase, was the concierge’s lodge. Saniel knocked at
the door in vain; it was locked and would not open. He waited several
minutes, and in his nervous impatience walked restlessly up and down the
court. At last an old woman appeared carrying a small wax taper. She was
feeble and bent, and began to excuse herself; she was alone and could
not be everywhere at the same time, in her lodge and lighting the lamps
on the stairways. Caffie lived on the first floor, in the wing on the
street.

Saniel mounted the stairs and rang the bell. A long time passed, or
at least it seemed long to him, before there was an answer. At last he
heard a slow and heavy step on the tiled floor and the door was opened,
but held by a hand and a foot.

“What do you wish?”

“Monsieur Caffie.”

“I am he. Who are you?”

“Doctor Saniel.”

“I have not sent for a doctor.”

“It is not as doctor that I am here, but as client.”

“This is not the hour when I receive clients.”

“But you are at home.”

“That is a fact!”

And Caffie, concluding to open the door, asked Saniel to enter, and then
closed it.

“Come into my office.”

They were in a small room filled with papers that had only an old desk
and three chairs for furniture; it communicated with the office of the
business man, which was larger, but furnished with the same simplicity
and strewn with scraps of paper that had a mouldy smell.

“My clerk is ill just now,” Caffie said, “and when I am alone I do not
like to open the door.”

After giving this excuse he offered Saniel a chair, and, seating himself
before his desk, lighted by a lamp from which he had taken the shade, he
said:

“Doctor, I am ready to listen to you.”

He replaced the shade on the lamp.

Saniel made his request concisely, without the details that he
had entered into with Glady. He owed three thousand francs to the
upholsterer who had furnished his apartment, and as he could not pay
immediately he was in danger of being prosecuted.

“Who is the upholsterer?” Caffie asked, while holding his left jaw with
his right hand.

“Jardine, Boulevard Haussmann.”

“I know him. It is his trade to take back his furniture in this way,
after three quarters of the sum has been paid, and he has become rich at
it. How much money have you already paid of this ten thousand francs?”

“Including the interest and what I have paid in instalments, nearly
twelve thousand francs.”

“And you still owe three thousand?”

“Yes.”

“That is nice.”

Caffie seemed full of admiration for this manner of proceeding.

“What guarantee have you to offer for this loan of three thousand
francs?”

“No other than my present position, I confess, and above all, my
future.”

At Caffie’s request he explained his plans and prospects for the future,
while the business man, with his cheek resting on his hand, listened,
and from time to time breathed a stifled sigh, a sort of groan.

“Hum! hum!” he said when Saniel finished his explanation. “You know, my
dear friend, you know:

   To fools alone the future’s smile unchangeable appears,
   For Friday’s laughter Sunday’s sun may change to bitter tears.”

“It is Sunday with you, my dear sir.”

“But I am not at the end of my life nor at the end of my energy, and I
assure you that my energy makes me capable of many things.”

“I do not doubt it; I know what energy can do. Tell a Greek who is dying
of hunger to go to heaven and he will go

     Graeculus esuriens in coelum, jusseris, ibit.”

“But I do not see that you have started for heaven.”

A smile of derision, accompanied by a grimace, crossed Caffies face.
Before becoming the usurer of the Rue Sainte-Anne, whom every one called
a rascal, he had been attorney in the country, deputy judge, and if
unmerited evils had obliged him to resign and to hide the unpleasant
circumstances in Paris, he never lost an opportunity to prove that by
education he was far above his present position. Finding this new client
a man of learning, he was glad to make quotations that he thought would
make him worthy of consideration.

“It is, perhaps, because I am not Greek,” Saniel replied; “but I am an
Auvergnat, and the men of my country have great physical strength.”

Caffie shook his head.

“My dear sir,” he said, “I might as well tell you frankly that I do not
believe the thing can be done. I would do it myself willingly, because
I read intelligence in your face, and resolution in your whole person,
which inspire me with confidence in you; but I have no money to put into
such speculations. I can only be, as usual, a go-between--that is to
say, I can propose the loan to one of my clients, but I do not know one
who would be contented with the guarantee of a future that is more
or less uncertain. There are so many doctors in Paris who are in your
position.”

Saniel rose.

“Are you going?” cried Caffie.

“But--”

“Sit down, my dear sir! It is no use to throw the handle after the axe.
You make me a proposition, and I show you the difficulties in the way,
but I do not say there is no way to extricate you from embarrassment. I
must look around. I have known you only a few minutes; but it does not
take long to appreciate a man like you, and, frankly, you inspire me
with great interest.”

What did he wish? Saniel was not simple enough to be caught by words,
nor was he a fop who accepts with gaping mouth all the compliments
addressed to him. Why did he inspire a sudden interest in this man who
had the reputation of pushing business matters to extremes? He would
find out. In the mean time he would be on his guard.

“I thank you for your sympathy,” he said.

“I shall prove to you that it is real, and that it may become useful.
You come to me because you want three thousand francs. I hope I may find
them for you, and I promise to try, though it will be difficult, very
difficult. They will make you secure for the present. But will they
assure your future? that is, will they permit you to continue the
important works of which you have spoken to me, and on which your future
depends? No. Your struggles will soon begin again. And you must shake
yourself clear from such cares in order to secure for yourself the
liberty that is indispensable if you wish to advance rapidly. And to
obtain this freedom from cares and this liberty, I see only one way--you
must marry.”




CHAPTER IV. ‘TWIXT THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA

Saniel, who was on his guard and expected some sort of roguery from this
man, had not foreseen that these expressions of interest were leading up
to a proposal of marriage, and an exclamation of surprise escaped
him. But it was lost in the sound of the door-bell, which rang at that
moment.

Caffie rose. “How disagreeable it is not to have a clerk!” he said.

He went to open the door with an eagerness that he had not shown to
Saniel, which proved that he had no fear of admitting people when he was
not alone.

It was a clerk from the bank.

“You will permit me,” Caffie said, on returning to his office. “It will
take but an instant.”

The clerk took a paper from his portfolio and handed it to Caffie.

Caffie drew a key from the pocket of his vest, with which he opened the
iron safe placed behind his desk, and turning his back to Saniel and the
clerk counted the bills which they heard rustle in his hands. Presently
he rose, and closing the door of the safe he placed under the lamp the
package of bills that he had counted. The clerk then counted them, and
placing them in his portfolio took his leave.

“Close the door when you go out,” Caffie said, who was already seated in
his arm-chair.

“Do not be afraid.”

When the clerk was gone Caffie apologized for the interruption.

“Let us continue our conversation, my dear sir. I told you that there is
only one way to relieve you permanently from embarrassment, and that
way you will find is in a good marriage, that will place ‘hic et nunc’ a
reasonable sum at your disposal.”

“But it would be folly for me to marry now, when I have no position to
offer a wife.”

“And your future, of which you have just spoken with so much assurance,
have you no faith in that?”

“An absolute faith--as firm to-day as when I first began the battle of
life, only brighter. However, as others have not the same reasons that
I have to hope and believe what I hope and believe, it is quite
natural that they should feel doubts of my future. You felt it yourself
instantly in not finding it a good guarantee for the small loan of three
thousand francs.”

“A loan and marriage are not the same thing. A loan relieves you
temporarily, and leaves you in a state to contract several others
successively, which, you must acknowledge, weakens the guarantee that
you offer. While a marriage instantly opens to you the road that your
ambition wishes to travel.”

“I have never thought of marriage.”

“If you should think of it?”

“There must be a woman first of all.”

“If I should propose one, what would you say?”

“But--”

“You are surprised?”

“I confess that I am.”

“My dear sir, I am the friend of my clients, and for many of them--I
dare to say it--a father. And having much affection for a young woman,
and for the daughter of one of my friends, while listening to you I
thought that one or the other might be the woman you need. Both have
fortunes, and both possess physical attractions that a handsome man
like yourself has a right to demand. And for the rest, I have their
photographs, and you may see for yourself what they are.”

He opened a drawer in his desk, and took from it a package of
photographs. As he turned them over Saniel saw that they were all
portraits of women. Presently he selected two and handed them to Saniel.

One represented a woman from thirty-eight to forty years, corpulent,
robust, covered with horrible cheap jewelry that she had evidently put
on for the purpose of being photographed. The other was a young girl
of about twenty years, pretty, simply and elegantly dressed, whose
distinguished and reserved physiognomy was a strong contrast to the
first portrait.

While Saniel looked at these pictures Caffie studied him, trying to
discover the effect they produced.

“Now that you have seen them,” he said, “let us talk of them a little.
If you knew me better, my dear sir, you would know that I am frankness
itself, and in business my principle is to tell everything, the good and
the bad, so that my clients are responsible for the decisions they make.
In reality, there is nothing bad about these two persons, because,
if there were, I would not propose them to you. But there are certain
things that my delicacy compels me to point out to you, which I do
frankly, feeling certain that a man like you is not the slave of narrow
prejudices.”

An expression of pain passed over his face, and he clasped his jaw with
both hands.

“You suffer?” Saniel asked.

“Yes, from my teeth, cruelly. Pardon me that I show it; I know by
myself that nothing is more annoying than the sight of the sufferings of
others.”

“At least not to doctors.”

“Never mind; we will return to my clients. This one”--and he touched the
portrait of the bejewelled woman--“is, as you have divined already, a
widow, a very amiable widow. Perhaps she is a little older than you are,
but that is nothing. Your experience must have taught you that the man
who wishes to be loved, tenderly loved, pampered, caressed, spoiled,
should marry a woman older than himself, who will treat him as a husband
and as a son. Her first husband was a careful merchant, who, had he
lived, would have made a large fortune in the butcher business”--he
mumbled this word instead of pronouncing it clearly--“but although he
died just at the time when his affairs were beginning to develop, he
left twenty thousand pounds’ income to his wife. As I have told you what
is good, I must tell you what is to be regretted. Carried away by gay
companions, this intelligent man became addicted to intemperance, and
from drinking at saloons she soon took to drinking at home, and his wife
drank with him. I have every reason to believe that she has reformed;
but, if it is otherwise, you, a doctor, can easily cure her--”

“You believe it?”

“Without doubt. However, if it is impossible, you need only let her
alone, and her vice will soon carry her off; and, as the contract will
be made according to my wishes in view of such an event, you will find
yourself invested with a fortune and unencumbered with a wife.”

“And the other?” Saniel said, who had listened silently to this curious
explanation of the situation that Caffie made with the most perfect
good-nature. So grave were the circumstances that he could not help
being amused at this diplomacy.

“I expected your demand,” replied the agent with a shrewd smile. “And if
I spoke of this amiable widow it was rather to acquit my conscience than
with any hope of succeeding. However free from prejudices one may be,
one always retains a few. I understand yours, and more than that, I
share them. Happily, what I am now about to tell you is something quite
different. Take her photograph, my dear sir, and look at it while I
talk. A charming face, is it not? She has been finely educated at a
fashionable convent. In a word, a pearl, that you shall wear. And now I
must tell you the flaw, for there is one. Who is blameless? The daughter
of one of our leading actresses, after leaving the convent she returned
to live with her mother. It was there, in this environment-ahem!
ahem!--that an accident happened to her. To be brief, she has a sweet
little child that the father would have recognized assuredly, had he not
been already married. But at least he has provided for its future by
an endowment of two hundred thousand francs, in such a way that whoever
marries the mother and legitimizes the child will enjoy the interest of
this sum until the child’s majority. If that ever arrives--these little
creatures are so fragile! You being a physician, you know more about
that than any one. In case of an accident the father will inherit half
the money from his son; and if it seems cruel for an own father to
inherit from his own son, it is quite a different thing when it is a
stranger who receives the fortune. This is all, my dear sir, plainly and
frankly, and I will not do you the injury to suppose that you do not see
the advantages of what I have said to you without need of my insisting
further. If I have not explained clearly--”

“But nothing is more clear.”

“--it is the fault of this pain that paralyzes me.”

And he groaned while holding his jaw.

“You have a troublesome tooth?” Saniel said, with the tone of a
physician who questions a patient.

“All my teeth trouble me. To tell the truth, they are all going to
pieces.”

“Have you consulted a doctor?”

“Neither a doctor nor a dentist. I have faith in medicine, of course;
but when I consult doctors, which seldom happens, I notice that they
think much more of their own affairs than of what I am saying, and that
keeps me away from them. But, my dear sir, when a client consults me, I
put myself in his place.”

While he spoke, Saniel examined him, which he had not done until this
moment, and he saw the characteristic signs of rapid consumption. His
clothes hung on him as if made for a man twice his size, and his face
was red and shining, as if he were covered with a coating of cherry
jelly.

“Will you show me your teeth?” he asked. “It may be possible to relieve
your sufferings.”

“Do you think so?”

The examination did not last long.

“Your mouth is often dry, is it not?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You are often thirsty?”

“Always.”

“Do you sleep well?”

“No.”

“Your sight troubles you?”

“Yes.”

“Have you a good appetite?”

“Yes, I eat heartily; and the more I eat the thinner I become. I am
turning into a skeleton.”

“I see that you have scars from boils on the back of your neck.”

“They made me suffer enough, the rascals; but they are gone as they
came. Hang it, one is no longer young at seventy-two years; one has
small vexations. They are small vexations, are they not?”

“Certainly. With some precautions and a diet that I shall prescribe, if
you wish, you will soon be better. I will give you a prescription that
will relieve your toothache.”

“We will talk of this again, because we shall have occasion to meet if,
as I presume, you appreciate the advantages of the proposition that I
have made you.”

“I must have time to reflect.”

“Nothing is more reasonable. There is no hurry.”

“But I am in a hurry because, if I do not pay Jardine, I shall find
myself in the street, which would not be a position to offer to a wife.”

“In the street? Oh, things will not come to such a pass as that! What
are the prosecutions?”

“They will soon begin; Jardine has already threatened me.”

“They are going to begin? Then they have not begun. If he does, as we
presume he will, proceed by a replevin, we shall have sufficient time
before the judgment. Do you owe anything to your landlord?”

“The lease expired on the fifteenth.”

“Do not pay it.”

“That is easy; it is the only thing that is easy for me to do.”

“It is an obstacle in the way of your Jardine, and may stop him a
moment. We can manage this way more easily. The important thing is to
warn me as soon as the fire begins. ‘Au revoir’, my dear Sir.”




CHAPTER V. A CHARMING VISITOR

Although Saniel had had no experience in business, he was not simple
enough not to know that in refusing him this loan Caffie meant to make
use of him.

“It is very simple,” he said to himself, as he went downstairs. “He
undertakes to manage my affairs, and in such a way that some day I shall
have to save myself by marrying that charming girl. What a scoundrel!”

However, the situation was such that he was glad to avail himself of the
assistance of this scoundrel. At least, some time was gained, and when
Jardine found that he was not disposed to let himself be slaughtered, he
might accept a reasonable arrangement. But he must manage so that Caffie
would not prevent this arrangement.

Unfortunately, he felt himself hardly capable of such manoeuvring,
having been always straightforward, his eyes fixed on the end he wished
to attain, and thinking only of the work through which he would attain
it. And now he must act the part of a diplomat, submitting to craftiness
and rogueries that were not at all in accord with his open nature.
He had begun by not telling Caffie, instantly, what he thought of his
propositions; but it is more difficult to act than to control one’s
self, to speak than to be silent.

What would he say, what would he do, when the time for action came?

He reached his house without having decided anything, and as he passed
before the concierge’s lodge absorbed in thought, he heard some one call
him.

“Doctor, come in a moment, I beg of you.”

He thought some one wished to consult him, some countryman who had
waited for his return; and, although he did not feel like listening
patiently to idle complainings, he turned back and entered the lodge.

“Some one brought this,” the concierge said, handing him a paper that
was stamped and covered with a running handwriting. “This” was the
beginning of the fire of which Caffie had spoken. Without reading it,
Saniel put it in his pocket and turned to go; but the concierge detained
him.

“I would like to say two words to ‘monchieur le docteur’ about this
paper.”

“Have you read it?”

“No, but I talked with the officer who gave it to me, and he told me
what it meant. It is unfortunate, doctor.”

To be pitied by his concierge! This was too much.

“It is not as he told you,” he replied, haughtily.

“So much the better. I am glad for you and for me. You can pay my little
bill.”

“Give it to me.”

“I have given it to you twice already, but I have a copy. Here it is.”

To be sued by a creditor paralyzed Saniel; he was stunned, crushed,
humiliated, and could only answer stupidly. Taking the bill that the
concierge handed him, he put it in his pocket and stammered a few words.

“You see, doctor, I must say what has been in my heart a long time. You
are my countryman, and I esteem you too much not to speak. In taking
your apartment and engaging your upholsterer, you did too much. You ruin
yourself. Give up your apartment, and take the one opposite that costs
less than half, and you will get on. You will not be obliged to leave
this quarter. What will become of our neighbors if you leave us? You are
a good doctor; everybody knows it and says so. And now, as for my bill,
it is understood that I shall be paid first, shall I not?”

“As soon as I have the money I will pay you.”

“It is a promise?”

“I promise you.”

“Thank you very much.”

“If it could be to-morrow, it would suit me. I am not rich, you know,
but I have always paid the gas-bill for your experiments.”

With the paper in his pocket, Saniel returned to Caffie, who was just
going out, and to whom he gave it.

“I will see about it this, evening,” said the man of business. “Just
now I am going to dinner. Do not worry. To-morrow I will do what is
necessary. Good-evening. I am dying of hunger.”

But three days before, Saniel emptied his purse to soothe his
upholsterer by an instalment as large as he was able to make it, keeping
only five francs for himself, and with the few sous left he could not
go to a restaurant, not even the lowest and cheapest. He could only
buy some bread for his supper, and eat it while working, as he had often
done before.

But when he returned to his rooms he was not in a state of mind to write
an article that must be delivered that evening. Among other things that
he had undertaken was one, and not the least fastidious, which consisted
in giving, by correspondence, advice to the subscribers of a fashion
magazine, or, more exactly speaking, to recommend, in the form of
medical advice, all the cosmetics, depilatories, elixirs, dyes,
essences, oils, creams, soaps, pomades, toothpowders, rouges, and also
all the chemists’ specialties, to which their inventors wished to give
an authority that the public, which believes itself acute, refused to
the simple advertisement on the last page. With his ambition and the
career before him, he would never have consented to carry on this
correspondence under his own name. He did it for a neighboring doctor,
a simple man, who was not so cautious, and who signed his name to these
letters, glad to get clients from any quarter. For his trouble, Saniel
took this doctor’s place during Sunday in summer, and from time to time
received a box of perfumery or quack medicines, which he sold at a low
price when occasion offered.

Every week he received the list of cosmetics and specialties that he
must make use of in his correspondence, no matter how he recommended
them, whether in answer to letters that were really addressed to him, or
by inventing questions that gave him the opportunity to introduce them.

He began to consult this list and the pile of letters from subscribers
that the magazine had sent him, when the doorbell rang. Perhaps it was
a patient, the good patient whom he had expected for four years. He left
his desk to open the door.

It was his coal man, who came with his bill.

“I will stop some day when I am near you,” Saniel said. “I am in a hurry
this evening.”

“And I am in a hurry, too; I must pay a large bill tomorrow, and I count
upon having some money from you.”

“I have no money here.”

After a long talk he got rid of the man and returned to his desk. He had
answered but a few of the many letters when his bell rang again. This
time he would not open the door; it was a creditor, without doubt. And
he continued his correspondence.

But for four years he had waited for chance to draw him a good ticket
in the lottery of life--a rich patient afflicted with a cyst or a tumor
that he would take to a fashionable surgeon, who would divide with
him the ten or fifteen thousand francs that he would receive for the
operation. In that case he would be saved.

He ran to the door. The patient with the cyst presented himself in the
form of a small bearded man with a red face, wearing over his vest the
wine-merchant’s apron of coarse black cloth. In fact, it was the wine
merchant from the corner, who, having heard of the officer’s visit, came
to ask for the payment of his bill for furnishing wine for three months.

A scene similar to that which he had had with the coal merchant, but
more violent, took place, and it was only by threatening to put him out
of the door that Saniel got rid of the man, who went away declaring that
he would come the next morning with an officer.

Saniel returned to his work.

His pen flew over the paper, when a noise made him raise his head.
Either he had not closed the door tightly, or his servant was entering
with his key. What did he want? He did not employ him all day, but only
during his office hours, to put his rooms in order and to open the door
for his clients.

As Saniel rose to go and see who it was, there was a knock at the door.
It was his servant, with a blank and embarrassed air.

“What is the matter, Joseph?”

“I thought I should find you, sir, so I came.”

“Why?”

Joseph hesitated; then, taking courage, he said volubly, while lowering
his eyes:

“I came to ask, sir, if you will pay me my month, which expired on the
fifteenth, because there is need of money at my house; if there was not
need of money I would not have come. If you wish, sir, I will release
you--”

“How?”

“I will take the coat that you made me order a month ago; I am quite
sure it is not worth what is due me, but it is always so.”

“Take the coat.”

Joseph took the coat from the wardrobe in the hall, and rolled it in a
newspaper.

“Of course you will not expect me in the morning,” he said, as he put
his key on the table. “I must look out for another place.”

“Very well, I shall not expect you.”

“Good-evening, sir.”

And Joseph hurried away as quickly as possible.

Left alone, Saniel did not return to his work immediately, but throwing
himself in an armchair he cast a melancholy glance around his office and
through the open door into the parlor. In the faint light of the candle
he saw the large armchairs methodically placed each side of the chimney,
the curtains at the windows lost in shadow, and all the furniture
which for four years had cost him so many efforts. He had long been the
prisoner of this Louis XIV camlet, and he was now going to be executed.
A beautiful affair, truly, brilliant and able! All this had been used
only by the poor Auvergnats, without Saniel enjoying it at all, for
he had neither the bourgeois taste for ornaments nor the desire for
elegance. A movement of anger and revolt against himself made him strike
his desk with his fist. What a fool he had been!

The bell rang again. This time, not expecting a rich patient, he would
not open it. After a moment a slight tap was heard on the panel. He rose
quickly and ran to open the door.

A woman threw herself into his arms.

“O my dearest! I am so glad to find you at home!”




CHAPTER VI. A SWEET CONSOLER

She passed her arm about him and pressed him to her, and with arms
entwined they entered the study.

“How glad I am!” she said. “What a good idea I had!”

With a quick movement she took off her long gray cloak that enveloped
her from head to foot.

“And are you glad?” she asked, as she stood looking at him.

“Can you ask that?”

“Only to hear you say that you are.”

“Are you not my only joy, the sweet lamp that gives me light in the
cavern where I work day and night?”

“Dear Victor!”

She was a tall, slender young woman with chestnut hair, whose thick
curls clustering about her forehead almost touched her eyebrows. Her
beautiful eyes were dark, her nose short, while her superb teeth and
rich, ruby-colored lips gave her the effect of a pretty doll; and she
had gayety, playful vivacity, gracious effrontery, and a passionate
caressing glance. Dressed extravagantly, like the Parisian woman who
has not a sou, but who adorns everything she wears, she had an ease,
a freedom, a natural elegance that was charming. With this she had the
voice of a child, a joyous laugh, and an expression of sensibility on
her fresh face.

“I have come to dine with you,” she said, gayly, “and I am so hungry.”

He made a gesture that was not lost upon her.

“Do I disturb you?” she asked, uneasily.

“Not at all.”

“Must you go out?”

“No.”

“Then why did you make a gesture that showed indifference, or, at least,
embarrassment?”

“You are mistaken, my little Phillis.”

“With any one else I might be mistaken, but with you it is impossible.
You know that between us words are not necessary; that I read in your
eyes what you would say, in your face what you think and feel. Is it not
always so when one loves--as I love you?”

He took her in his arms and kissed her long and tenderly. Then going
to a chair on which he had thrown his coat, he drew from the pocket the
bread that he had bought.

“This is my dinner,” he said, showing the bread.

“Oh! I must scold you. Work is making you lose your head. Can you not
take time to eat?”

He smiled sadly.

“It is not time that I want.”

He fumbled in his pocket and brought out three big sous.

“I cannot dine at a restaurant with six sous.”

She threw herself in his arms.

“O dearest, forgive me!” she cried. “Poor, dear martyr! Dear, great man!
It is I who accuse you, when I ought to embrace your knees. And you do
not scold me; a sad smile is your only reply. And it is really so bad as
that! Nothing to eat!”

“Bread is very good eating. If I might be assured that I shall always
have some!”

“Well, to-day you shall have something more and better. This morning,
seeing the storm, an idea came to me associated with you. It is quite
natural, since you are always in my heart and in my thoughts. I told
mamma that if the storm continued I would dine at the pension. You can
imagine with what joy I listened to the wind all day, and watched the
rain and leaves falling, and the dead branches waving in the whirlwind.
Thank God, the weather was bad enough for mamma to believe me safe at
the pension; and here I am. But we must not fast. I shall go and buy
something to eat, and we will play at making dinner by the fire, which
will be far more amusing than going to a restaurant.”

She put on her cloak quickly.

“Set the table while I make my purchases.”

“I have my article to finish that will be sent for at eight o’clock.
Just think, I have three tonics to recommend, four preparations of iron,
a dye, two capillary lotions, an opiate, and I don’t know how many soaps
and powders. What a business!”

“Very well, then, do not trouble yourself about the table; we will set
it together when you have finished, and that will be much more amusing.”

“You take everything in good part.”

“Is it better to look on the dark side? I shall soon return.”

She went to the door.

“Do not be extravagant,” he said.

“There is no danger,” she replied, striking her pocket.

Then, returning to him, she embraced him passionately.

“Work!”

And she ran out.

They had loved each other for two years. At the time they met, Saniel
was giving a course of lectures on anatomy at a young ladies’ school
just outside of Paris, and every time he went out there he saw a young
woman whom he could not help noticing. She came and went on the
same trains that he did, and gave lessons in a rival school. As she
frequently carried under her arm a large cartoon, and sometimes a
plaster cast, he concluded that she gave lessons in drawing. At first
he paid no attention to her. What was she to him? He had more important
things in his head than women. But little by little, and because she was
reserved and discreet, he was struck by the vivacity and gayety of her
expression. He really enjoyed looking at this pretty and pleasing young
woman. However, his looks said nothing; if their eyes smiled when they
met, that was all; they did not make each other’s acquaintance. When
they left the train they did not notice each other; if he took the left
side of the street, she took the other, and vice versa. This state
of things lasted several months without a word having been exchanged
between them; in due time they learned each other’s names and
professions. She was a professor of drawing, as he supposed, the
daughter of an artist who had been dead several years, and was called
Mademoiselle Phillis Cormier. He was a physician for whom a brilliant
future was prophesied, a man of power, who would some day be famous;
and, very naturally, their attitude remained the same. There was no
particular reason why it should change. But accident made a reason.
One summer day, at the hour when they ordinarily took the train back
to Paris, the sky suddenly became overcast, and it was evident that
a violent storm was approaching. Saniel saw Phillis hurrying to the
station without an umbrella, and, as some friend had lent him one, he
decided to speak to her for the first time.

“It seems as if the storm would overtake us before we reach the station.
As you have no umbrella, will you permit me to walk beside you, and to
shelter you with mine?”

She replied with a smile, and they walked side by side until the rain
began to fall, when she drew nearer to him, and they entered the station
talking gayly.

“Your umbrella is better than Virginia’s skirt,” she said.

“And what is Virginia’s skirt?”

“Have you not read Paul and Virginia?”

“No.”

She looked at him with a mocking smile, wondering what superior men
read.

Not only had he not read Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s romance, nor any
others, but he had never been in love. He knew nothing of the affairs of
the heart nor of the imagination. Leisure must be had for light reading,
and even more for love, for they require a liberty of mind and an
independence of life that he had not. Where could he find time to read
novels? When and how could he pay attention to a woman? Those that he
had known since his arrival in Paris had not had the slightest influence
over him, and he retained only faint memories of them. On the contrary,
thinking of this walk in the rain, he remembered this young girl with a
vividness entirely new to him. She made a strong impression on him, and
it remained. He saw her again, with her smile that showed her brilliant
teeth, he heard the music of her voice, and the bare plain that he had
walked so many times now seemed the most beautiful country in the world
to him. Evidently there was a change in him; something was awakened in
his soul; for the first time he discovered that the hollow and muscular
conoid organ called the heart had a use besides for the circulation of
blood.

What a surprise and what a disappointment! Was he going to be simpleton
enough to love this young girl and entangle his life, already so hard
and heavily weighted, with a woman? A fine thing, truly, and nature had
built him to play the lover! It is true that only those who wish it fall
in love, and he knew the power of will by experience.

But he soon lost confidence in himself. Away from Phillis he could do as
he wished, but with her it was as she wished. With one look she mastered
him. He met her, furious at the influence she exercised over him, and
against which he had struggled since their last meeting; he left her,
ravished at feeling how profoundly he loved her.

To a man whose life had been ruled by reason and logic until this
moment, these contradictions were exasperating; and he only excused
himself for submitting to them by saying that they could in no way
modify the line of conduct that he had traced out for himself, nor make
him deviate from the road that he followed.

Rich, or even with a small fortune, he might--when he was with her and
in her power--let himself be carried away; but when he was dying of
hunger he was not going to commit the folly of taking a wife. What would
he have to give her? Misery, nothing but misery; and shame, in default
of any other reason, would forever prevent him from offering himself to
her.

She was the daughter of an artist who, after years of struggle, died at
the moment when fortune was beginning to smile upon him. Ten years more
of work, and he would have left his family, if not rich, at least in
comfortable circumstances. In reality, he left nothing but ruin.
The hotel he built was sold, and, after the debts were paid, nothing
remained but some furniture. His widow, son, and daughter must work. The
widow, having no trade, took in sewing; the son left college to become
the clerk of a money-lender named Caffie; the daughter, who, happily
for her, had learned to draw and paint under her father’s direction,
obtained pupils, and designed menacs for the stationers, and painted
silk fans and boxes. They lived with great economy, submitting to many
privations. The brother, weary of his monotonous existence and of the
exactions of his master, left them to try his fortunes in America.

If Saniel ever married, which he doubted, certainly he would not marry a
woman situated as Phillis was.

This reflection was reassuring, and he was more devoted to her. Why
should he not enjoy the delicious pleasure of seeing her and listening
to her? His life was neither gay nor happy; he felt perfectly sure of
himself, and, as he knew her now, he was also sure of her--a brave and
honest girl. Otherwise, how had she divined that he loved her?

They continued to see each other with a pleasure that seemed equal on
both sides, meeting in the station, arranging to take the same trains,
and talking freely and gayly.

Things went on this way until the approach of vacation, when they
decided to take a walk after their last lesson, instead of returning
immediately to Paris.

When the day came the sun was very hot; they had walked some distance,
when Phillis expressed a wish to rest for a few minutes. They seated
themselves in a shady copse, and soon found themselves in each other’s
arms.

Since then Saniel had never spoken of marriage, and neither had Phillis.

They loved each other.




CHAPTER VII. A LITTLE DINNER FOR TWO

Saniel was still at work when Phillis returned.

“You have not yet finished, dear?”

“Give me time to cure, by correspondence, a malady that has not yielded
to the care of ten physicians, and I am yours.”

In three lines he finished the letter, and left his desk.

“I am ready. What shall I do?”

“Help me to take things out of my pockets.”

“Don’t press too hard,” she said as he took each parcel.

At last the pockets were empty.

“Where shall we dine?” she asked.

“Here, as the dining-room is transformed into a laboratory.”

“Then let us begin by making a good fire. I wet my feet coming from the
station.”

“I do not know whether there is any wood.”

“Let us see.”

She took the candle and they passed into the kitchen, which, like the
dining-room, was a laboratory, a stable where Saniel kept in cages pigs
from India and rabbits for his experiments, and where Joseph heaped
pell-mell the things that were in his way, without paying any attention
to the stove in which there never had been a fire. But their search was
vain; there was everything in this kitchen except fire-wood.

“Do you value these boxes?” she asked, caressing a little pig that she
had taken in her arms.

“Not at all; they enclosed the perfumes and tonics, but they are useless
now.”

They returned to the office, Saniel carrying the boxes.

“We will set the table here,” she said, gayly, for Saniel told her
that the dining-room was uninviting, as it was a small bacteriological
laboratory.

The table was set by Phillis, who went and came, walking about with a
gracefulness that Saniel admired.

“You are doing nothing,” she said.

“I am watching you and thinking.”

“And the result of these thoughts?”

“It is that you have a fund of good-humor and gayety, an exuberance of
life, that would enliven a man condemned to death.”

“And what would have become of us, I should like to know, if I had been
melancholy and discouraged when we lost my poor papa? He was joy itself,
singing all day long, laughing and joking. He brought me up, and I am
like him. Mamma, as you know, is melancholy and nervous, looking on the
dark side, and Florentin is like her. I obtained a place for Florentin,
I found work for mamma and for myself. We all took courage, and
gradually we became calm.”

She looked at him with a smile that said:

“Will you let me do for you what I have done for others?”

But she did not speak these words. On the contrary, she immediately
endeavored to destroy the impression which she believed her words had
made upon him.

“Go and bring some water,” she said, “and I will light the fire.”

When he returned, carrying a carafe, the fire blazed brightly, lighting
the whole room. Phillis was seated at the desk, writing.

“What are you doing?” he asked in surprise.

“I am writing our menu, for you know we are not going to sit down at the
table like the bourgeois. How do you like it?”

She read it to him.

“Sardines de Nantes.”

“Cuisse de dinde rotie.”

“Terrine de pate de foie gras aux truffes du Perigord.”

“But this is a feast.”

“Did you think that I would offer you a fricandeau au jus?”

She continued:

“Fromage de Brie.”

“Choux a la creme vanillge.”

“Pomme de Normandie.”

“Wine.”

“Ah! Voila! What wine? I do not wish to deceive you. Let us put, ‘Wine
from the wine-seller at the corner.’ And now we will sit down.”

As he was about to seat himself, she said:

“You do not give me your arm to conduct me to the table. If we do not
do things seriously and methodically we shall not believe in them, and
perhaps the Perigord truffles will change into little black pieces of
anything else.”

When they were seated opposite to each other, she continued, jesting:

“My dear doctor, did you go to the representation of Don Juan, on
Monday?”

And Saniel, who, in spite of all, had kept a sober face, now laughed
loudly.

“Charming!” she cried, clapping her hands. “No more preoccupation;
no more cares. Look into my eyes, dear Victor, and think only of the
present hour, of the joy of being together, of our love.”

She reached her hand over the table, and he pressed it in his.

“Very well.” The dinner continued gayly, Saniel replying to Phillis’s
smiles, who would not permit the conversation to languish. She helped
him to each dish, poured out his wine, leaving her chair occasionally
to put a piece of wood on the fire, and such shoutings and laughter had
never been heard before in that office.

However, she noticed that, little by little, Saniel’s face, that relaxed
one moment, was the next clouded by the preoccupation and bitterness
that she had tried hard to chase away. She would make a new effort.

“Does not this charming little dinner give you the wish to repeat it?”

“How? Where?”

“As I am able to come this evening without making mamma uneasy, I shall
find some excuse to come again next week.”

He shook his head.

“Have you engagements for the whole of next week?” she asked with
uneasiness.

“Where shall I be next week, to-morrow, in a few days?”

“You alarm me. Explain, I beg of you. O Victor, have pity! Do not leave
me in suspense.”

“You are right; I ought to tell you everything, and not let your tender
heart torment itself, trying to explain my preoccupation.”

“If you have cares, do you not esteem me enough to let me share them
with you? You know that I love you; you only, to-day, to-morrow,
forever!”

Saniel had not left her ignorant of the difficulties of his position,
but he had not entered into details, preferring to speak of his hopes
rather than of his present misery.

The story that he had already told to Glady and Caffie he now told to
Phillis, adding what had passed with the concierge, the wine-seller, the
coal man, and Joseph.

She listened, stupefied.

“He took your coat?” she murmured.

“That was what he came for.”

“And to-morrow?”

“Ah! to-morrow--to-morrow!”

“Working so hard as you have, how did you come to such a pass?”

“Like you, I believed in the virtue of work, and look at me! Because I
felt within me a will that nothing could weaken, a strength that nothing
could fatigue, a courage that nothing could, dishearten, I imagined that
I was armed for battle in such a way that I should never be conquered,
and I am conquered, as much by the fault of circumstances as by my
own--”

“And in what are you to blame, poor dear?”

“For my ignorance of life, stupidity, presumption, and blindness. If
I had been less simple, should I have been taken in by Jardine’s
propositions? Should I have accepted this furniture, this apartment? He
told me that the papers he made me sign were mere formalities, that in
reality I might pay when I could, and that he would be content with a
fair interest. That seemed reasonable, and, without inquiring further,
I accepted, happy and delighted to have a home, feeling sure of having
strength to bear this burden. To have confidence in one’s self is
strength, but it is also weakness. Because you love me you do not know
me; you do not see me as I am. In reality, I am not sociable, and
I lack, absolutely, suppleness, delicacy, politeness, as much in my
character as in my manners. Being so, how can I obtain a large practice,
or succeed, unless it is by some stroke of luck? I have counted on the
luck, but its hour has not yet sounded. Because I lack suppleness I have
not been able to win the sympathy or interest of my masters. They see
only my reserve; and because I stay away from them, as much through
timidity as pride, they do not come to me--which is quite natural,
I admit. And because I have not yielded my ideas to the authority of
others, they have taken a dislike to me, which is still more natural.
Because I lack politeness, and am still an Auvergnat, heavy and awkward
as nature made me, men of the world disdain me, judging me by my
exterior, which they see and dislike. More wary, more sly, more
experienced, I should be, at least, sustained by friendship, but I have
given no thought to it. What good is it? I had no need of it, my force
was sufficient. I find it more easy to make myself feared than loved.
Thus formed, there are only two things for me to do: remain in my poor
room in the Hotel du Senat, living by giving lessons and by work from
the booksellers, until the examination and admission to the central
bureau; or to establish myself in an out-of-the-way quarter at
Belleville, Montrouge, or elsewhere, and there practise among people who
will demand neither politeness nor fine manners. As these two ways are
reasonable, I have made up my mind to neither. Belleville, because I
should work only with my legs, like one of my comrades whom I saw
work at Villette: ‘Your tongue, good. Your arm, good.’ And while he is
supposed to be feeling the pulse of the patient with one hand, with the
other he is writing his prescription: ‘Vomitive, purgative, forty sous;’
and he hurries away, his diagnosis having taken less than five minutes;
he had no time to waste. I object to the Hotel du Senat because I have
had enough of it, and it was there that Jardine tempted me with his
proposals. See what he has brought me to!”

“And now?”




CHAPTER VIII. EXPLANATIONS

At this moment, without warning, the candle on the table went out.

Phillis rose. “Where are the candles?” she asked.

“There are no more; this was the last.”

“Then we must brighten up the fire.”

She threw a small log on the hearth, and then, instead of resuming
her seat, she took a cushion from the sofa, and placing it before the
chimney, threw herself upon it, and leaned her elbow on Saniel’s knee.

“And now?” she repeated, her eyes raised to his.

“Now I suppose the only thing for me to do is to return to Auvergne and
become a country doctor.”

“My God! is it possible?” she murmured in a tone that surprised Saniel.
If there was sadness in this cry, there was also a sentiment that he did
not understand.

“On leaving the school I could continue to live at the Hotel du Senat,
and, while giving lessons, prepare my ‘concours’; now, after having
reached a certain position, can I return to this life of poverty and
study? My creditors, who have fallen on me here, will harass me, and my
competitors will mock my misery--which is caused by my vices. They will
think that I dishonor the Faculty, and I shall be rebuffed. Neither
doctor of the hospitals nor fellow, I shall be reduced to nothing but a
doctor of the quarter. Of what use is it? The effort has been made here;
you see how it has succeeded.”

“Then you mean to go?”

“Not without sorrow and despair, since it will be our separation, the
renouncement of all the hopes on which I have lived for ten years, the
abandonment of my work, death itself. You see now why, in spite of your
gayety, I have not been able to hide my preoccupation from you. The more
charming you were, the more I felt how dear you are, and the greater my
despair at the thought of separation.”

“Why should we separate?”

“What do you mean?”

She turned toward him.

“To go with you. You must acknowledge that until this moment I have
never spoken to you of marriage, and never have I let the thought appear
that you might one day make me your wife. In your position, in the
struggle you have been through, a wife would have been a burden that
would have paralyzed you; above all, such a poor, miserable creature
as myself, with no dot but her misery and that of her family. But the
conditions are no longer the same. You are as miserable as I am,
and more desperate. In your own country, where you have only distant
relatives who are nothing to you, as they have not your education or
ideas, desires or habits, what will become of you all alone with your
158 disappointment and regrets? If you accept me, I will go with you;
together, and loving each other, we cannot be unhappy anywhere. When you
come home fatigued you will find me with a smile; when you stay at home
you will tell me your thoughts, and explain your work, and I will try to
understand. I have no fear of poverty, you know, and neither do I fear
solitude. Wherever we are together I shall be happy. All that I ask of
you is to take my mother with us, because you know I cannot leave her
alone. In attending her, you have learned to know her well enough
to know that she is not disagreeable or difficult to please. As for
Florentin, he will remain in Paris and work. His trip to America has
made him wise, and his ambition will now be easily satisfied; to earn
a small salary is all that he asks. Without doubt we shall be a burden,
but not so heavy as one might think at first. A woman, when she chooses,
brings order and economy into a house, and I promise you that I will be
that woman. And then I will work. I am sure my stationer will give me
as many menus when I am in Auvergne as he does now that I am in Paris.
I could, also, without doubt, procure other work. It would be a hundred
francs a month, perhaps a hundred and fifty, perhaps even two hundred.
While waiting for your patients to come, we could live on this money. In
Auvergne living must be cheap.”

She had taken his hands in hers, and she watched anxiously his face as
the firelight shone on it, to see the effect of her words. It was the
life of both of them that was to be decided, and the fulness of her
heart made her voice tremble. What would he reply? She saw that his face
was agitated, without being able to read more.

As she remained silent, he took her head in his hands, and looked in her
face for several moments.

“How you love me!” he said.

“Let me prove it in some way besides in words.”

“It would be cowardly to let you share my misery.”

“It would be loving me enough to feel sure that I would be happy.”

“And I?”

“Is not the love in your heart greater than pride? Do you not feel that
since I have loved you my love has filled all my life, and that there is
nothing in the world, in the present or in the future, but it and you?
Because I see you for several hours from time to time in Paris, I am
happy; whatever difficulties await us, I should be much happier in
Auvergne, because we should be together always.”

He remained silent for some time.

“Could you love me there?” he murmured.

Evidently it was more to himself than to her that he addressed this
question, which was the sum of his reflections.

“O dear Victor!” she cried. “Why do you doubt me? Have I deserved it?
The past, the present, do they not assure the future?”

He shook his head.

“The man you have loved, whom you love, has never shown himself to you
as he really is. In spite of the trials and sorrows of his life he has
been able to answer your smile with a smile, because, cruel as his life
was, he was sustained by hope and confidence; in Auvergne there will be
no more hope or confidence, but the madness of a broken life, and the
dejection of impotence. What sort of man should I be? Could you love
such a man?”

“A thousand times more, for he would be unhappy, and I should have to
comfort him.”

“Would you have the strength to do it? After a time you would become
weary, for the burden would be too heavy, however great your devotion
or profound your tenderness, to see my real position and my hopes, and,
descending into the future, to see my ruin. You know I am ambitious
without having ever compassed the scope of this ambition, and of the
hopes, dreams if you like, on which it rests. Understand that these
dreams are on the eve of being realized; two months more, and in
December or January I pass the ‘concours’ for the central bureau, which
will make me a physician of the hospitals, and at the same time the one
for the admission, which opens the Faculty of Medicine to me. Without
pride, I believe myself in a position to succeed--what sportsmen call
‘in condition.’ And just when I have only a few days to wait, behold me
ruined forever.”

“Why forever?”

“A man leaves his village for Paris to make a name for himself, and he
returns only when bad luck or inability sends him back. And then it is
only every four years that there is a ‘concours’ for admission. In four
years what will be my moral and intellectual condition? How should I
support this exile of four years? Imagine the effect that four years of
isolation in the mountains will produce. But this is not all. Besides
this ostensible end that I have pursued since I left my village, I
have my special work that I can carry out only in Paris. Without having
overwhelmed you with the details of medicine, you know that it is about
to undergo a revolution that will transform it. Until now it has been
taught officially, in pathology, that the human organism carries within
itself the germ of a great many infectious diseases which develop
spontaneously in certain conditions; for instance, that tuberculosis
is the result of fatigue, privations, and physiological miseries. Well,
recently it has been admitted, that is to say, the revolutionists admit,
a parasitical origin for these diseases, and in France and Germany there
is an army looking for these parasites. I am a soldier in this army,
and to help me in these researches I established a laboratory in the
dining-room. It is to the parasites of tuberculosis and cancers that I
devote myself, and for seven years, that is, since I was house-surgeon,
my comrades have called me the cancer topic. I have discovered the
parasite of the tuberculosis, but I have not yet been able to free it
from all its impurities by the process of culture. I am still at it.
That is to say, I am very near it, and to-morrow, perhaps, or in a few
days, I may make a discovery that will be a revolution, and cover
its discoverer with glory. The same with the cancer. I have found its
microbe. But all is not done. See what I must give up in leaving Paris.”

“Why give all this up? Could you not continue your researches in
Auvergne?”

“It is impossible, for many reasons that are too long to explain, but
one will suffice. The culture of these parasites can be done only in
certain temperatures rigorously maintained at the necessary degree, and
these temperatures can be obtained only by stoves, like the one in my
laboratory, fed by gas, the entrance of which is automatically regulated
by the temperature of the water. How could I use this stove in a country
where there is no gas? No, no! If I leave Paris, everything is at an end
my position, as well as my work. I shall become a country doctor, and
nothing but a country doctor. Let the sheriff turn me out to-morrow,
and all the four years’ accumulations in my laboratory, all my works en
train that demand only a few days or hours to complete, may go to the
second-hand dealer, or be thrown into the street. Of all my
efforts, weary nights, privations, and hopes, there remains only one
souvenir--for me. And yet, if it did not remain, perhaps I should be
less exasperated, and should accept with a heart less sore the life to
which I shall never resign myself. You know very well that I am a rebel,
and do not submit tamely.”

She rose, and taking his hand, pressed it closely in her own.

“You must stay in Paris,” she said. “Pardon me for having insisted that
you could live in the country. I thought more of myself than of you, of
our love and our marriage. It was an egotistic thought, a bad thought.
A way must be found, no matter what it costs, to enable you to continue
your work.”

“But how to find it? Do you think I have not tried everything?”

He related his visits to Jardine, his solicitations, prayers, and also
his request of a loan from Glady, and his visit to Caffie.

“Caffie!” she cried. “What made you think of going to Caffie?”

“I went partly because you had often spoken of him.”

“But I spoke of him to you as the most wicked of men, capable of
anything and everything that is bad.”

“And partly, also, because I knew from one of my patients that he lends
to those of whom he can make use.”

“What did he say to you?”

“That it was probable he would not be able to find any one who would
lend what I wished, but he would try to find some one, and would give
me an answer tomorrow evening. He also promised to protect me from
Jardine.”

“You have put yourself in his hands?”

“Well, what do you expect? In my position, I am not at liberty to go to
whom I wish and to those who inspire me with confidence in their honor.
If I should go to a notary or a banker they would not listen to me,
for I should be obliged to tell them, the first thing, that I have no
security to offer. That is how the unfortunate fall into the hands of
rascals; at least, these listen to them, and lend them something, small
though it may be.”

“What did he give you?”

“Advice.”

“And you took it?”

“There is time gained. To-morrow, perhaps, I shall be turned into the
street. Caffie will obtain a respite.”

“And what price will he ask for this service?”

“It is only those who own something who worry about the price.”

“You have your name, dignity, and honor, and once you are in Caffies
hands, who knows what he may exact from you, what he may make you do,
without your being able to resist him?”

“Then you wish me to leave Paris?”

“Certainly not; but I wish you to be on your guard against Caffie, whom
you do not know, but I do, through what Florentin told us when he was
with him. However secret a man may be, he cannot hide himself from his
clerk. He is not only guilty of rascalities, but also of real crimes. I
assure you that he deserves ten deaths. To gain a hundred francs he will
do anything; he makes money only for the pleasure of making it, for he
has neither child nor relative.”

“Well, I promise to be on my guard as you advise. But, wicked as Caffie
may be, I believe that I shall accept the concours that he offered
me. Who knows what may happen in the short time that he gains for me?
Because I need not tell you that I know beforehand what his reply will
be to my request for a loan--he could find no one.”

“I shall come, all the same, to-morrow evening to learn his answer.”




CHAPTER IX. CAFFIE’S ANSWER

Although Saniel did not build any false hopes on Caffie’s reply, he went
to see him the next afternoon at the same hour.

As before, he waited some time after ringing the bell. At last he heard
a slow step within.

“Who is there?” Caffie asked.

As soon as Saniel answered, the door was opened.

“As I do not like to be disturbed in the evening by troublesome people,
I do not always open the door,” Caffie said. “But I have a signal for my
clients so that I may know them. After ringing, knock three times on the
door.”

During this explanation they entered Caffie’s office.

“Have you done anything about my affair?” Saniel asked, after a moment,
as Caffie seemed disinclined to open the conversation.

“Yes, my dear sir. I have been running about all the morning for you. I
never neglect my clients; their affairs are mine.”

He paused.

“Well?” Saniel said.

Caffie put on an expression of despair.

“What did I tell you, my dear sir? Do you remember? Do me the honor
to believe that a man of my experience does not speak lightly. What I
foresaw has come to pass. Everywhere I received the same reply. The risk
is too great; no one would take it.”

“Not even for a large interest?”

“Not even for a large interest; there is so much competition in your
profession. As for me, I believe in your future, and I have proved it by
my proposition; but, unfortunately, I am only an intermediary, and not
the lender of money.”

Caffie emphasized the words, “my proposition,” and underlined them with
a glance; but Saniel did not appear to understand.

“And the upholsterer’s summons?” he asked.

“You may be easy on that point. I have attended to it. Your landlord, to
whom he owes rent, will interfere, and your creditor must indemnify him
before going farther. Will he submit? We shall see. If he does, we shall
defend ourselves on some other ground. I do not say victoriously, but in
a way to gain time.”

“How much time?”

“That, my dear sir, I do not know; the whole thing depends upon our
adversary. But what do you mean by ‘how much time?’--eternity?”

“I mean until April.”

“That is eternity. Do you believe that you will be able to free yourself
in April? If you have expectations founded on something substantial, you
should tell me what they are, my dear sir.”

This question was put with such an air of benevolence, that Saniel was
taken in by it.

“I have no guarantee,” he said. “But, on the other hand, it is of the
utmost importance to me that I should have this length of time. As I
have explained to you, I am about to pass two examinations; they will
last three months, and in March, or, at the latest, in April, I shall be
a physician of the hospitals, and fellow of the Faculty. In that case
I should then offer a surface to the lenders, that would permit you,
without doubt, to find the sum necessary to pay Jardine, whatever
expenses there may be, and your fee.”

As he spoke, Saniel saw that he was wrong in thus committing himself,
but he continued to the end.

“I should be unworthy of your confidence, my dear sir,” Caffie replied,
“if I encouraged you with the idea that we could gain so much time.
Whatever it costs me--and it costs me much, I assure you--I must tell
you that it is impossible, radically impossible; a few days, yes, or a
few weeks, but that is all.”

“Well, obtain a few weeks,” Saniel said, rising, “that will be
something.”

“And afterward?”

“We shall see.”

“My dear sir, do not go. You would not believe how much I am touched by
your position; I think only of you. When I learned that I could not find
the sum you desire, I paid a friendly visit to my young client of whom I
spoke to you--”

“The one who received a superior education in a fashionable convent?”

“Exactly; and I asked her what she would think of a young doctor, full
of talent, future professor of the Faculty, actually considered already
a savant of the first order, handsome--because you are handsome, my dear
sir, and it is no flattery to say this--in good health, a peasant by
birth, who presented himself as a husband. She appeared flattered, I
tell you frankly. But immediately afterward she said, ‘And the child?’
To which I replied that you were too good, too noble, too generous, not
to have the indulgence of superior men, who accept an involuntary fault
with serenity. Did I go too far?”

He did not wait for an answer.

“No?” he went on. “Exactly. The child was present, for the mother
watches over it with a solicitude that promises much for the future, and
I examined it leisurely. It is very delicate, my dear sir, and like its
father. The poor baby! I doubt if you, with all your skill, can make
it live. If it should die, as it is to be feared it will, it would not
injure your reputation. You can give it care, but not life.”

“Speaking of health,” interrupted Saniel, who did not wish to reply,
“did you do what I advised about yourself?”

“Not yet. The chemists of this quarter are only licensed cutthroats; but
I am going this evening to see one of my clients who is a chemist, and
he will deal honestly with me.”

“I will see you again, then.”

“When you wish, my dear sir; when you have reflected. You have the
password.”

Before leaving home Saniel gave his key to the concierge, so that on
her arrival Phillis might go immediately to his rooms. On his return
the concierge told him that “madame” was up-stairs, and when he rang the
bell, Phillis opened the door.

“Well?” she asked in a trembling voice, before he had time to enter.

“It is as I told you yesterday; he has found no one.”

She clasped him in a long, passionate embrace.

“And the upholsterer?”

“Caffie has promised to gain some time for me.”

While speaking, they entered the office. A fire burned on the hearth,
and an inviting dinner was on the table. Saniel looked at it in
surprise.

“I have set the table, you see; I am going to dine with you.”

And throwing herself in his arms:

“Knowing Caffie better than you do, I knew what his answer would be, and
I did not wish you to be alone on your return. I made an excuse for not
dining with mamma.”

“But this chicken?”

“We must have a piece de resistance.”

“This fire, and these candles?”

“There, that is the end of my economies. I should have been so happy if
they had been less miserable and more useful.”

As on the previous evening, they sat before the fire, and she began to
talk of various things in order to distract him. But what their lips
did not say, their eyes, on meeting, expressed with more intensity than
words could do.

It was Saniel who suddenly betrayed his preoccupation.

“Your brother studied Caffie well,” he said, as if speaking to himself.

“He did, indeed!”

“He is certainly the most thorough rascal that I have ever met.”

“He proposed something infamous, I am sure.”

“He proposed that I should marry.”

“I suspected that.”

“This is the reason why he refuses to lend me the money. I was foolish
enough to tell him frankly just how I am situated, and how important
it is for me to be free until April. He hopes that I shall be so pushed
that I will accept one of the women whom he has proposed to me. With the
knife at my throat, I should have to yield.”

“And these women?” she asked, not daring to look at him.

“Do not be alarmed, you have nothing to fear. One is the drunken widow
of a butcher, and the other is a young girl who has a baby.”

“He dares to propose such women to a man like you!”

And Saniel repeated all that Caffie had said to him about these two
women.

“What a monster he is!” Phillis said.

“While he was telling me these things I thought of what you said--that
if some one killed him, it would be no more than he deserved.”

“That is perfectly true.”

“Nothing would have been easier than for me to have made away with him.
He had the toothache, and when he showed me his teeth I could easily
have strangled him. We were alone, and a miserable diabetic, such as he
is, who has not more than six months to live, I am sure, could not have
resisted a grasp like this. I could take his keys from his pocket, open
his safe, and take the thirty, forty, sixty thousand francs that I saw
heaped up there. The devil take me if it were ever discovered. A
doctor does not strangle his patients, he poisons them. He kills them
scientifically, not brutally.”

“People who have no conscience can do such things; but for us they are
impossible.”

“I assure you it is not conscience that would have restrained me.”

“The fear of remorse, if I may use an ugly word.”

“But intelligent persons have no remorse, my dear child, because they
reason before the deed, and not after. Before acting they weigh the pros
and cons, and know what the consequences of their actions will be to
others as well as to themselves. If this previous examination proves
to them that for some reason or other they may act, they will always be
calm, assured that they will feel no remorse, which is only the reproach
of conscience.”

“Without doubt what you say is to the point, but it is impossible for
me to accept it. If I have never committed crimes, I have often been
foolish and have committed faults, many of them deliberately, after the
examination of which you speak. I should have been, according to you,
perfectly placid and free from the reproach of conscience; however, the
next morning I woke unhappy, tormented, often overwhelmed, and unable to
stifle the mysterious voice that accused me.”

“And in whose name did it speak, this voice, more vague than
mysterious?”

“In the name of my conscience, evidently.”

“‘Evidently’ is too much, and you would be puzzled if called upon
to demonstrate this evidence; whereas, nothing is more uncertain and
elusive than the thing that is called conscience, which is in reality
only an affair of environment and of education.”

“I do not understand.”

“Does your conscience tell you it is a crime to love me?”

“No, decidedly.”

“You see, then, that you have a personal way of understanding what is
good and bad, which is not that of our country, where it is admitted,
from the religious and from the social point of view, that a young
girl is guilty when she has a lover. Of course, you see, also, that
conscience is a bad weighing-machine, since each one, in order to make
it work, uses a weight that he has himself manufactured.”

“However it is, you did right not to strangle Cafflie.”

“Whom you, yourself, have condemned to death.”

“By the hand of justice, whether human or divine; but not by yours, any
more than by Florentin’s or mine, although we know better than any one
that he does not deserve any mercy.”

“And you see I foresaw your objections, as I did not tighten his
cravat.”

“Happily.”

“Is it necessary to say ‘happily’?”




CHAPTER X. SANIEL MAKES A RESOLUTION

This evening Phillis was obliged to be at home early, but she cleared
off the table, and put everything in order before leaving.

“You can breakfast on the remains of the chicken,” she said, as she put
it in the pantry.

And as Saniel accompanied her with a candle in his hand, he saw that
she had thought not only of his breakfast for the following day, but for
many days, besides carrots for the rabbits.

“What a good heart you have!” he said.

“Because I think of the rabbits?”

“Because of your tenderness and thoughtfulness.”

“I wish I could do something for you!”

As soon as she was gone he seated himself at his desk and began to work,
anxious to make up for the time that he had given to sentiment. The fact
that his work might not be of use to him, and that his experiments
might be rudely interrupted the next morning or in a few days, was not a
sufficient reason for being idle. He had work to do, and he worked as
if with the certitude that he would pass his examinations, and that
his experiments of four years past would have a good ending, without
interference from any one.

This was his strong point, this power to work, that was never disturbed
or weakened by anything; not by pleasure or pain, by preoccupation or by
misery. In the street he could think of Phillis, be he hungry or sleepy;
at his desk he had no thought of Phillis, neither of hunger nor of
sleep, no cares, no memories; his work occupied him entirely.

It was his strength, and also his pride, the only superiority of which
he boasted; for although he knew that he had others, he never spoke of
them, while he often said to his comrades:

“I work when I will and as much as I wish. My will never weakens when I
am at work.”

This evening he worked for about an hour, in his usual condition of
mind; neither sheriffs, nor Jardine, nor Caffie troubled him. But having
to draw upon his memory for certain facts, he found that it did not
obey him as usual; there were a hesitation, a fogginess, above all,
extraordinary wanderings. He wrestled with it and it obeyed, but only
for a short time, and soon again it betrayed him a second time, then a
third and fourth time.

Decidedly he was not in a normal state, and his will obeyed in place of
commanding.

There were a name and a phrase that recurred to him mechanically from
time to time. The name was Caffie, and the phrase was, “Nothing easier.”

Why should this hypothesis to strangle Caffie, of which he had lightly
spoken, and to which he had attached no importance at the moment when he
uttered it, return to him in this way as a sort of obsession?

Was it not strange?

Never, until this day, had he had an idea that he could strangle a man,
even as wicked as this one, and yet, in talking of it, he found very
natural and legitimate reasons for the murder of this scamp.

Had not Phillis herself condemned him?

To tell the truth, she had added that Providence or justice should be
his executor, but this was the scruple of a simple conscience, formed in
a narrow environment, to which influence he would not submit.

Had he these scruples, this old man who coldly, and merely for the
interest of so much a hundred on a dot, advised him to hasten the death
of a woman by drunkenness, and that of an infant in any way he pleased?

When he reached this conclusion he stopped, and asked himself whether he
were mad to pursue this idea; then immediately, to get rid of it, he set
to work, which absorbed him for a certain time, but not so long a time
as at first.

Then, finding that he could not control his will, he turned his thoughts
to Caffie.

It was only too evident that if he had carried out the idea of
strangling Caffie, all the difficulties against which he had struggled,
and which would overwhelm him, if not the following day, at least in a
few days, would have disappeared immediately.

No more sheriffs, no more creditors. What a deliverance!

Repose, the possibility of passing examinations with a calm spirit that
the fever of material troubles would not disturb--in this condition he
felt his success was assured.

And his experiments! He would run no danger of seeing them rudely
interrupted. His preparations were not cast out-of-doors; his precious
culture-tubes were not broken; his vases, his balloons, were not at the
second-hand dealer’s. He continued this train of thought to the results
that he desired for him, glory; for humanity, the cure of one, and
perhaps two, of the most terrible maladies with which it was afflicted.

The question was simple:

On one side, Caffie;

On the other side, humanity and science;

An old rascal who deserved twenty deaths, and who would, anyhow, die
naturally in a short time;

And humanity, science, which would profit by a discovery of which he
would be the author.

He saw that the perspiration stood out on his hands, and he felt it run
down his neck.

Why this weakness? From horror of the crime, the possibility of which he
admitted? Or from fear of seeing his experiments destroyed?

He would reflect, think about it, be upon his guard.

He had told Phillis that intelligent men, before engaging in an action,
weigh the pro and con.

Against Caffie’s death he saw nothing.

For, on the contrary, everything combined.

If he had had Phillis’s scruples, or Brigard’s beliefs, he would have
stopped.

But, not having them, would he not be silly to draw back?

Before what should he shrink? Why should he stop?

Remorse? But he was convinced that intelligent men had no remorse when
they came to a decision on good grounds. It was before that they felt
remorse, not after; and he was exactly in this period of before.

Fear of being arrested? But intelligent men do not let themselves be
arrested. Those who are lost are brutes who go straight ahead, or
the half-intelligent, who use their skill and cunning to combine a
complicated or romantic act, in which their hand is plainly seen. As for
him, he was a man of science and precision, and he would not compromise
himself by act or sentiment; there would be nothing to fear during the
action, and nothing afterward. Caffie strangled, suspicion would not
fall upon a doctor, but on a brute. When doctors wish to kill any one,
they do it learnedly, by poison or by some scientific method. Brutal men
kill brutally; murder, called the assassin’s profession.

A few minutes before, he was inundated by perspiration; this word froze
him.

He rose nervously, and walked up and down the room with long, unsteady
steps. The fire had long since gone out; out-of-doors the street noises
had ceased, and in his brain resounded the one word that he pronounced
in a low tone, “Assassin!”

Was he the man to be influenced and stopped by a word? Where are the
rich, the self-made men, the successful men, who have not left some
corpses on the road behind them? Success carries them safely, and they
achieved success only because they had force.

Certainly, violence was not recreation, and it would be more agreeable
to go in his way peacefully, by the power of intelligence and work, than
to make a way by blows; but he had not chosen this road, he was thrown
into it by circumstances, by fate, and whoever wishes to reach the end
cannot choose the means. If one must walk in the mud, what matters it,
when one knows that one will not get muddy?

If Caffie had had heirs, poor people who expected to be saved from
misery by inheriting his fortune, he would have been touched by this
consideration, undoubtedly. Robber! The word was yet more vile than that
of assassin. But who would miss the few banknotes that he would take
from the safe? To steal is to injure some one. Whom would he injure?
He could see no one. But he saw distinctly an army of afflicted persons
whom he would benefit.

A timid ring of the bell made him start violently, and he was angry with
himself for being so nervous, he who was always master of his mind as of
his body.

He opened the door, and a man dressed like a laborer bowed humbly.

“I beg your pardon for disturbing you, sir.”

“What do you want?”

“I called on account of my wife, if you will be so good as to come to
see her.”

“What is the matter with her?”

“She is about to be confined. The nurse does not know what to do, and
sent me for a doctor.”

“Did the nurse tell you to come for me?”

“No, sir; she sent me to Doctor Legrand.”

“Well?”

“His wife told me he could not get up on account of his bronchitis. And
the chemist gave me your address.”

“That is right.”

“I must tell you, sir, I am an honest man, but we are not rich; we could
not pay you--immediately.”

“I understand. Wait a few minutes.”

Saniel took his instruments and followed the laborer, who, on the way,
explained his wife’s condition.

“Where are we going?” Saniel asked, interrupting these explanations.

“Rue de la Corderie.”

It was behind the Saint Honore’ market, on the sixth floor, under the
roof, in a room that was perfectly clean, in spite of its poverty. As
soon as Saniel entered the nurse came forward, and in a few words told
him the woman’s trouble.

“Is the child living?”

“Yes.”

“That is well; let us see.”

He approached the bed and made a careful examination of the patient, who
kept repeating:

“I am going to die. Save me, doctor!”

“Certainly, we shall save you,” he said, very softly. “I promise you.”

He turned away from the bed and said to the nurse:

“The only way to save the mother is to kill the child.”

The operation was long, difficult, and painful, and after it was over
Saniel remained a long time with the patient. When he reached the street
a neighboring clock struck five, and the market-place had already begun
to show signs of life.

But in the streets was still the silence and solitude of night, and
Saniel began to reflect on what had occurred during the last few hours.
Thus, he had not hesitated to kill this child, who had, perhaps, sixty
or seventy years of happy life before it, and he hesitated at the death
of Caffie, to whom remained only a miserable existence of a few weeks.
The interests of a poor, weak, stunted woman had decided him; his, those
of humanity, left him perplexed, irresolute, weak, and cowardly. What a
contradiction!

He walked with his eyes lowered, and at this moment, before him on the
pavement, he saw an object that glittered in the glare of the gas. He
approached it, and found that it was a butcher’s knife, that must have
been lost, either on going to the market or the slaughterhouse.

He hesitated a moment whether he should pick it up or leave it there;
then looking all about him, and seeing no one in the deserted street,
and hearing no sound of footsteps in the silence, he bent quickly and
took it.

Caffie’s fate was decided.




BOOK 2.




CHAPTER XI. THE INSTRUMENT OF DEATH

When, after two hours’ sleep, Saniel woke, he did not at first think of
this knife; he was tired and dull. Mechanically he walked about his room
without paying attention to what he was doing, as if he were in a state
of somnambulism, and it astonished him, because he never felt weariness
of mind any more than of body, no matter how little he had slept, nor
how hard he had worked.

But suddenly, catching a glimpse of the knife that he had placed on the
mantel, he received a shock that annihilated his torpor and his fatigue.
It dazzled him like a flash of lightning.

He took it, and, going to the window, he examined it by the pale light
of early morning. It was a strong instrument that, in a firm hand, would
be a terrible arm; newly sharpened, it had the edge of a razor.

Then the idea, the vision that had come to him two hours before, came
back to him, clear and complete at nightfall, that is, at the moment
when the concierge was in the second wing of the building, he mounted
to Caffie’s apartment without being seen, and with this knife he cut his
throat. It was as simple as it was easy, and this knife left beside the
corpse, and the nature of the wound, would lead the police to look for a
butcher, or at least a man who was in the habit of using a knife of this
kind.

The evening before, when he had discussed Caffie’s death, the how and
the when still remained vague and uncertain. But now the day and the
means were definitely settled: it should be with this knife, and this
evening.

This shook him out of his torpor and made him shudder.

He was angry with himself for this weakness. Did he know or did he not
know what he wished? Was he irresolute or cowardly?

Then, going from one idea to another, he thought of an observation that
he had made, which appeared to prove that with many subjects there is
less firmness in the morning than in the evening. Was this the result
of dualism of the nervous centres, and was the human personality double
like the brain? Were there hours when the right hemisphere is master of
our will, and were there other hours when the left is master? Did one of
these hemispheres possess what the other lacked, and is it according to
the activity of this or that one, that one has such a character or such
a temperament? This would be curious, and would amount to saying that, a
lamb in the morning, one might be a tiger at evening. With him it was a
lamb that woke in the morning to be devoured by a tiger during the
day. To which hemisphere belonged the one and the other of these
personalities?

He was angry with himself for yielding to these reflections; it was a
time, truly, to study this psychological question! It was of Caffie that
he should think, and of the plan which in an instant flashed through his
mind in the street, before he decided to pick up this knife.

Evidently things were neither so simple nor so easy as they at first
appeared, and to insure the success of his plan a combination of
circumstances was necessary, which might be difficult to bring about.

Would not the concierge see him pass? Would no one go up or down the
stairs? Would Caffie be alone? Would he open the door? Might not some
one ring after he had entered?

Here was a series of questions that he had not thought of before, but
which now presented itself.

He must examine them, weigh them, and not throw himself giddily into an
adventure that presented such risks.

He was alone all day, fortunately, and, as in the state of agitation in
which he found himself he could not think of work, he gave himself up to
this examination. The stakes were worth the trouble--his honor and his
life.

As soon as he was dressed he went out, and walked straight before him
through the streets that were already filled with people.

It was only when he had left the heart of Paris that he could reflect
as he wished, without being disturbed each instant by people in a hurry,
for whom he must make way, or by others who, reading the newspapers, did
not look before them, and so jostled against him.

Evidently the risks were more serious than he had imagined; and, as
they loomed up before him, he asked himself whether he should go on. To
suppress Caffie, yes; to give himself up, no.

“If it is impossible--”

He was not the man to set himself wildly against the impossible: he
should have had a dream, a bad dream, and that would be all.

He stopped, and, after a moment of hesitation, turning on his heel, he
retraced his steps. Of what use was it to go farther? He had no need
to reflect nor to weigh the pro and con; he must give up this plan;
decidedly it was too dangerous.

He had gone but a short distance when he asked himself whether these
dangers were such as he saw them, and whether he were face to face with
a radically demonstrated impossibility.

Without doubt, the concierge might observe him when he passed her lodge,
either on going up-stairs or coming down; and, also, she might not
observe him. This, in reality, depended much upon himself, and on his
method of proceeding.

Every evening this lame old concierge lighted the gas in the two wings
of the building, one on the street and one on the court. She began by
lighting that on the street, and, with the difficulty that she found in
walking, it should take her some time to climb the five stories and
to descend. If one watched from the street when, at dusk, she left her
lodge with a wax taper in her hand, and mounted the stairs behind her,
at a little distance, in such a way as to be on the landing of the first
story when she should reach the second, there would be time, the deed
done, to regain the street before she returned to her lodge, after
having lighted the gas on the two staircases. It was important to
proceed methodically, without hurry, but, also, without loitering.

Was this impossible?

Here, exactly, was the delicate point which he must examine with
composure, without permitting himself to be influenced by any other
consideration than that which sprang from the deed itself.

He was wrong, then, not to continue his route, and it was better,
assuredly, to get out of Paris. In the country, in the fields or woods,
he could find the calm that was indispensable to his over-excited brain,
in which ideas clashed like the waves of a disturbed sea.

He was at this moment in the middle of the Faubourg Saint Honore; he
followed a street that would bring him to the Champs Elysees, a desert
at this early hour.

It took him some time to examine all the hypotheses that might present
themselves, and he reached the conclusion that what had appeared
impossible to him was not so. If he preserved his calmness, and did
not lose perception of the passing time, he could very well escape the
concierge, which was the main point.

To tell the truth, the danger of the concierge removed, all was not
easy. There was the possibility of meeting one of the lodgers on the
stairs; there was a chance of not finding Caffie at home, or, at least,
not alone; or the bell might ring at the decisive moment. But, as
everything depended upon chance, these circumstances could not be
decided beforehand. It was a risk. If one of them happened, he would
wait until the next day; it would be one more day of agitation to live
through.

But one question that should be decided in advance, because, surely, it
presented serious dangers, was how he should justify the coming into his
hands of a sum of money which, providentially and in the nick of time,
relieved him from the embarrassments against which he struggled.

He had reached the Bois de Boulogne and still continued his walk. In
passing a fountain the rippling of the water attracted his attention,
and he stopped. Although the weather was damp and cold under the
influence of a strong west wind charged with rain, his tongue was dry;
he drank two goblets of water, and then pursued his way, indifferent
where he went.

Then he built up an arrangement which appeared ingenious to him, when it
occurred to him to remember that he had gone to Caffie to borrow three
thousand francs. Why would he not lend it to him, if not the first
day, at least the second? With this loan he paid his debts, if he were
questioned on this point. To prove this loan he need only to sign a
receipt which he could place in the safe, and which would be found
there. Would not the first thought of those who had signed a paper of
this kind be to take it when an occasion presented itself? As he would
not seize this occasion to carry off his note, it would be the proof
that he had not opened the safe.

Among other advantages, this arrangement did away with robbery; it
was only a loan. Later he would return these three thousand francs to
Caffies heirs. So much the worse for him if it were a forced loan.

On returning to Paris he would buy a sheet of stamped paper, and as he
had asked the price the previous evening, he knew that he could afford
the expense.

When he reached Saint Cloud he entered a tavern and ordered some bread
and cheese and wine. But if he drank little, he ate less, his parched
throat refusing to swallow bread.

He took up his march in the clayey streets on the slope of Mont
Valerian, but he was insensible to the unpleasantness of slipping on the
soft soil, and walked hither and thither, his only care being not to get
too far away from the Seine, so that he might enter Paris before night.

He was delighted since he had made up his mind to make out and sign
a receipt for the money. But on giving it further consideration, he
perceived that it was not so ingenious as he had at first supposed. Do
not the dealers of stamped paper often number their paper? With this
number it would be easy to find the dealer and him who had bought it.
And then, was it not likely that a scrupulous business man like Caffie
would keep a record of the loans he made, and would not the absence of
this one and the note be sufficient to awaken suspicion and to direct it
to him?

Decidedly, he only escaped one danger to fall into another.

For a moment he was discouraged, but it did not go so far as weakness.
His error had been in imagining that the execution of the idea that had
come to him while picking up the knife was as plain as it was easy. But
complicated and perilous as it was, it was not impossible.

The question which finally stood before him was, to know whether he
possessed the force needed to cope with these dangers, and on this
ground hesitation was not possible; to wish to foresee everything was
folly; that which he would not have expected, would come to pass.

He returned toward Paris, and by the Pont de Suresnes reentered the Bois
de Boulogne. As it was not yet three o’clock, he had plenty of time to
reach the Rue Sainte-Anne before night; but, on the way, a heavy shower
forced him to take shelter, and he watched the falling rain, asking
himself if this accident, which he had not foreseen, would not upset his
plan. A man who had received the force of this shower could not appear
in the street before Caffie’s door without attracting the attention of
the passers-by, and it was important for him that he should not attract
the attention of any one.

At length the rain ceased, and at twenty minutes of five he reached his
home. There remained fifteen or twenty minutes of daylight, which was
more than he needed.

He stuck the point of the knife in a cork, and, after having placed it
between the folded leaves of a newspaper, in the inside left-hand pocket
of his overcoat, he went out.




CHAPTER XII. THE CRUCIAL MOMENT

When he reached Caffies door the night had scarcely fallen, and the
streets were not yet lighted.

The better and the surest plan for him had been to wait in the
‘porte-cochere’ across the street; from there he could watch the
‘concierge’, who would not be able to go out without being seen by him.
But though the passers were few at this moment, they might have observed
him. Next to this ‘porte-cochere’ was a small ‘cafe’, whose brilliant
lights would cause him to be seen quite plainly. He, therefore, walked
on, but soon returned.

All irresolution, all hesitation, had disappeared, and the only point on
which he still questioned himself bore upon the state in which he found
himself at this moment. He felt himself firm, and his pulse, he
was certain, beat regularly. He was as he had imagined he would be;
experience confirmed his foresight; his hand would tremble no more than
his will.

As he passed before the house he saw the concierge come slowly out of
her lodge and close her door carefully, putting the key in her pocket.
In her left hand she held something white that he could not see
distinctly in the twilight, but it was probably the wax-taper which,
doubtless, she had not lighted for fear the wind would blow it out.

This was a favorable circumstance, that gave him one or two minutes more
than he had counted on, for she would be obliged to strike a match on
the stairs to light her taper; and, in the execution of his plan, two
minutes, a single minute even, might be of great importance.

With dragging steps and bent back she disappeared through the vestibule
of the stairway. Then Saniel continued his walk like an ordinary
passer-by until she had time to reach the first story; then, turning,
he returned to the porte-cochere and entered quietly. By the gaslight
in the vestibule he saw by his watch, which he held in his hand, that
it was fourteen minutes after five o’clock. Then, if his calculation
was right, at twenty-four or twenty-five minutes after five he must pass
before the lodge, which should still be empty at that moment.

On the staircase above him he heard the heavy step of the concierge; she
had lighted the gas on the first story, and continued on her way slowly.
With rapid but light steps he mounted behind her, and, on reaching
Caffie’s door, he rang the bell, taking care not to ring too loudly or
too timidly; then he knocked three times, as Caffie had instructed him.

Was Caffie alone?

Up to this time all had gone as he wished; no one in the vestibule, no
one on the stairs; fate was in his favor; would it accompany him to the
end?

While he waited at the door, asking himself this question, an idea
flashed into his mind. He would make a last attempt. If Caffie consented
to make the loan he would save himself; if he refused, he condemned
himself.

After several seconds, that appeared like hours, his listening ears
perceived a sound which announced that Caffie was at home. A scratching
of wood on the tiled floor denoted that a chair had been pushed aside;
heavy, dragging steps approached, then the bolt creaked, and the door
was opened cautiously.

“Ah! It is you, my dear sir!” Caffie said, in surprise.

Saniel entered briskly and closed the door himself, pressing it firmly.

“Is there anything new?” Caffie asked, as he led the way to his office.

“No,” Saniel replied.

“Well, then?” Caffie asked, as he seated himself in an armchair before
his desk, on which stood a lighted lamp. “I suppose you have come to
hear more about my young friend. This hurry augurs well.”

“No, it is not of the young person that I wish to talk to you.”

“I am sorry.”

On seating himself opposite to Caffie, Saniel had taken out his watch.
Two minutes had passed since he left the vestibule; he must hurry. In
order to keep himself informed of the passing of time, he retained his
watch in his hand.

“Are you in a hurry?”

“Yes; I will come immediately to business. It concerns myself, my
position, and I make a last appeal to you. Let us be honest with each
other. Undoubtedly you think that, pushed by my distress, and seeing
that I shall be lost forever, I shall decide to accept this marriage to
save myself.”

“Can you suppose such a thing, my dear sir?” Caffie cried.

But Saniel stopped him....

“The calculation is too natural for you not to have made it. Well,
I must tell you that it is false. Never will I lend myself to such a
bargain. Renounce your project, and let us discuss my demand. I am in
absolute want of three thousand francs, and I will pay the interest that
you fix upon.”

“I have not found a money-lender, my dear sir. I have taken a great deal
of trouble, I assure you, but I did not succeed.”

“Make an effort yourself.”

“Me? My dear sir!”

“I address myself to you.”

“But I have no ready money.”

“It is a desperate appeal that I make. I understand that your long
experience in business makes you insensible to the misery that you see
every day--”

“Insensible! Say that it breaks my heart, my dear sir.”

“But will you not permit yourself to be touched by the misery of a man
who is young, intelligent, courageous, who will drown if a hand is not
held out to help him? For you, the assistance that I ask so earnestly is
nothing--”

“Three thousand francs! Nothing! Bless me! How you talk!”

“For me, if you refuse me, it is death.”

Saniel began to speak with his eyes fixed on the hands of his watch, but
presently, carried away by the fever of the situation, he raised them to
look at Caffie, and to see the effect that he produced on him. In this
movement he made a discovery that destroyed all his calculations.

Caffie’s office was a small room with a high window looking into the
court; never having been in this office except in the evening, he had
not observed that this window had neither shutters nor curtains of
muslin or of heavier stuff; there was nothing but the glass. To tell the
truth, two heavy curtains of woollen damask hung on either side of
the window, but they were not drawn. Talking to Caffie, who was placed
between him and this window, Saniel suddenly perceived that on the other
side of the court, in the second wing of the building, on the second
story, were two lighted windows directly opposite to the office, and
that from there any one could see everything that occurred in the
office.

How should he execute his plan under the eyes of these people whom he
saw coming and going in this room? He would be lost. In any case, it was
risking an adventure so hazardous that he would be a fool to attempt it,
and he was not that; never had he felt himself so much the master of his
mind and nerves.

Also, it was not only to save Caffie’s life that he argued, it was to
save himself in grasping this loan.

“I can only, to my great regret, repeat to you what I have already said,
my dear sir. I have no ready money.”

And he held his jaw, groaning, as if this refusal aroused his toothache.

Saniel rose; evidently there was nothing for him to do but to go. It was
finished, and instead of being in despair he felt it as a relief.

But, as he was about to leave the room, an idea flashed through his
mind.

He looked at his watch, which he had not consulted for some time; it was
twenty minutes after five; there yet remained four minutes, five at the
most.

“Why do you not draw these curtains?” he said. “I am sure your
sufferings are partly caused by the wind that comes in this window.”

“Do you think so?”

“I am sure of it; you should be warm about the head, and avoid currents
of air.”

Passing behind Caffie, he went to the window to draw the curtains, but
the cords would not move.

“It is years since they were drawn,” Caffie said. “Doubtless the cords
are entangled. I will bring the light.”

And, taking the lamp, he went to the window, holding it high in order to
throw light on the cords.

With a turn of the hand Saniel disentangled the cords, and the curtains
slid on the rods, almost covering the window.

“It is true a good deal of air did come in the window,” Caffie said. “I
thank you, my dear doctor.”

All this was done with a feverish rapidity that astonished Caffie.

“Decidedly, you are in a hurry,” he said.

“Yes, in a great hurry.”

He looked at his watch.

“However, I have still time to give you a consultation if you desire
it.”

“I would not trouble you--”

“You do not trouble me.”

“But--”

“Sit down in your armchair, and show me your mouth.”

While Caffie seated himself, Saniel continued in a vibrating voice:

“You see I give good for evil.”

“How is that, my dear sir?”

“You refuse me a service that would save me, and I give you a
consultation. It is true, it is the last.”

“And why the last, my dear sir?”

“Because death is between us.”

“Death!”

“Do you not see it?”

“No.”

“I see it.”

“You must not think of such a thing, my dear sir. One does not die
because one cannot pay three thousand francs.”

The chair in which Caffie seated himself was an old Voltaire, with an
inclined back, and he half reclined in it. As his shirtcollar was
too large for him since he had become thin, and his narrow cravat was
scarcely tied, he displayed as much throat as jaw.

Saniel, behind the chair, had taken the knife in his right hand, while
he pressed the left heavily on Caffies forehead, and with a powerful
stroke, as quick as lightning, he cut the larynx under the glottis,
as well as the two carotid arteries, with the jugular veins. From this
terrible wound sprang a large jet of blood, which, crossing the room,
struck against the door. Cut clean, not a cry could be formed in the
windpipe, and in his armchair Caffie shook with convulsions from head to
foot.

Leaving his position behind the chair, Saniel, who had thrown the
knife on the floor, looked at his watch and counted the ticking of the
second-hand in a low voice.

“One, two, three-”

At the end of ninety seconds the convulsions ceased.

It was twenty-three minutes after five. Now it was important that he
should hurry and not lose a second.

The blood, after having gushed out, had run down the body and wet the
vest pocket in which was the key of the safe. But blood does not produce
the same effect upon a doctor as upon those who are not accustomed to
its sight and odor, and to its touch. In spite of the lukewarm sea in
which it lay, Saniel took the key, and after wiping his hand on one of
the tails of Caffie’s coat, he placed it in the lock.

Would it turn freely, or was it closed with a combination? The question
was poignant. The key turned and the door opened. On a shelf and in a
wooden bowl were packages of bank-notes and rolls of gold that he had
seen the evening when the bank-clerk came. Roughly, without counting; he
thrust them into his pocket, and without closing the safe, he ran to the
front door, taking care not to step in the streams of blood, which, on
the sloping tiled floor, ran toward this door. The time was short.

And now was the greatest danger, that of meeting some one behind this
door, or on the stairs. He listened, and heard no noise. He went out,
and no one was to be seen. Without running, but hastily, he descended
the stairs. Should he look in the lodge, or should he turn his head
away? He looked, but the concierge was not there.

A second later he was in the street mingling with the passersby, and he
drew a long breath.




CHAPTER XIII. DISTRACTION

There was no longer any need to be cautious, to listen, to stretch his
nerves, to restrain his heart; he could walk freely and reflect.

His first thought was to endeavor to explain to himself how he felt, and
he found that it was an immense relief; something, doubtless, analogous
to the returning to life after being in a state of asphyxiation.
Physically, he was calm; morally, he felt no remorse. He was right,
therefore, in his theory when he told Phillis that in the intelligent
man remorse precedes the action, instead of following it.

But where he was mistaken was in imagining that during the act he should
maintain his coolness and force, which, in reality, had failed him
completely.

Going from one idea to another, tossed by irresolution, he was by no
means the strong man that he had believed himself: one to go to the
end unmoved, ready to face every attack; master of his nerves as of his
will, in full possession of all his powers. On the contrary, he had been
the plaything of agitation and weakness. If a serious danger had risen.
before him, he would not have known on which side to attack it; fear
would have paralyzed him, and he would have been lost.

To tell the truth, his hand had been firm, but his head had been
bewildered.

There was something humiliating in this, he was obliged to acknowledge;
and, what was more serious, it was alarming. Because, although
everything had gone as he wished, up to the present time, all was not
finished, nor even begun.

If the investigations of the law should reach him, how should he defend
himself?

He felt sure that he had not been seen in Caffies house at the moment
when the crime was committed; but does one ever know whether one has
been seen or not?

And there was the production of money that he should use to pay his
debts, which might become an accusation against which it would be
difficult to defend himself. In any case, he must be ready to explain
his position. And what might complicate the matter was, that Caffie,
a careful man, had probably taken care to write the numbers of his
bank-notes in a book, which would be found.

On leaving the Rue Sainte-Anne he took the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs
to his home, to leave the bank-notes and to wash off the stains of blood
that might have splashed on him and his hands, particularly the right
one, which was still red. But suddenly it occurred to him that he might
be followed, and it would be folly to show where he lived. He hastened
his steps, in order to make any one who might be following him run,
and took the streets that were not well lighted, those where there was
little chance of any one seeing the stains, if they were visible, on
his clothing or boots. He walked in this way for nearly half an hour,
turning and returning on his track, and after having crossed the Place
Vendome twice, where he was able to look behind him, he decided to go
home, not knowing whether he should be satisfied to have bewildered all
quest, or whether he should not be furious to have yielded to a sort of
panic.

As he passed by the lodge without stopping, his concierge called him,
and, running out, gave him a letter with unusual eagerness. Saniel, who
wished to escape observation, took it hastily, and stuffed it into his
pocket.

“It is an important letter,” the concierge said. “The servant who
brought it told me that it contained money.”

It needed this recommendation at such a moment, or Saniel would not have
opened it, which he did as soon as he entered his rooms.

   “I do not wish, my dear Doctor, to leave Paris for Monaco, where I
   go to pass two or three months, without sending you our thanks.

               “Yours very gratefully,

                    “C. DUPHOT.”

These thanks were represented by two bills of one hundred francs, a
payment more than sufficient for the care that Saniel had given some
months before to the mistress of this old comrade. Of what use now were
these two hundred francs, which a few days sooner would have been so
much to him? He threw them on his desk; and then, after having lighted
two candles, he inspected his clothing.

The precaution that he had taken to place himself behind the chair was
wise. The blood, in squirting in front and on each side, had not
reached him; only the hand that held the knife and the shirt-sleeve were
splashed, but this was of no consequence. A doctor has the right to have
some blood on his sleeves, and this shirt went to join the one he had
worn the previous night when attending the sick woman.

Free from this care, he still had the money in his pockets. He emptied
them on his desk and counted all: five rouleaux of gold, of a thousand
francs, and three packages of ten thousand francs each, of bank-notes.

How should he get rid of this sum all at once, and, later, how should he
justify its production when the moment came, if it came?

The question was complex, and, unfortunately for him, he was hardly in a
state to consider it calmly.

For the gold, he had only to burn the papers in which it was rolled.
Louis have neither numbers nor particular marks, but bills have. Where
should he conceal them while waiting to learn through the newspapers if
Caffie had or had not made a note of these numbers?

While burning these papers on which Caffie had written “2,000 francs,”
 he tried to think of a place of concealment.

As he threw a glance around him, asking from things the inspiration that
his brain did not furnish, he caught sight of the letter he had just
received, and it suggested an idea. Duphot was at Monaco to play. Why
should he not go also, and play?

Having neither relatives nor friends from whom he could procure a
certain sum, his only resource was to make it at play; and in his
desperate position, known to every one, nothing was more natural than
this experiment. He had received two hundred francs, which would not
save him from his creditors. He would risk them at roulette at Monaco.
Whether he lost or won was of little consequence. He would have played
that would be sufficient. He would be seen playing. Who would know
whether he lost or won? From Monaco he would pay Jardine by telegraph,
out of the five thousand Louis, which would be more than sufficient for
that; and, when he returned to Paris, he would free himself from his
other creditors with what remained.

The money affair decided--and it seemed to him cleverly settled--did
not include the bank-notes, which, spread out before his eyes, disturbed
him. What should he do with them? One moment he thought of burning them,
but reflection held him back. Would it not be folly to destroy this
fortune? In any case, would it not be the work of a narrow mind, of one
not fertile in resources?

In trying to think of some safe place to hide the banknotes, one thought
continually absorbed him: What was happening in the Rue Sainte-Anne? Had
any one discovered the dead man?

He should be there to observe events, instead of timidly shutting
himself up in his office.

For several minutes he tried to resist this thought, but it was stronger
than his will or his reason. So much was he under its power that he
could do nothing.

Willing or unwilling, foolish or not, he must go to the Rue Sainte-Anne.

He washed his hands, changed his shirt, and throwing the notes and gold
into a drawer, he went out.

He knew very well that there was a certain danger in leaving these
proofs of the crime, which, found in an official search, would overwhelm
him, without his being able to defend himself. But he thought that
an immediate search was unlikely to occur, and if he could not make a
probable story, it would be better for him not to reason about it. It
was a risk that he ran, but how much he had on his side!

He hastened along the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, but on approaching
the Rue Sainte-Anne he slackened his steps, looking about him and
listening. Nothing unusual struck him. Even when he turned into the Rue
Sainte-Anne he found it bore its ordinary aspect. A few passers-by,
not curious; no groups on the sidewalk; no shopkeepers at their doors.
Nothing was different from usual.

Apparently, nothing had yet been discovered. Then he stopped, judging
it useless to go farther. Already he had passed too much time before
Caffie’s door, and when one was of his build, above the medium height,
with a physiognomy and appearance unlike others, one should avoid
attracting attention.

For several minutes he walked up and down slowly, from the Rue
Neuve-des-Petits-Champs to the Rue du Hasard; from there he could see
Caffie’s house, and yet be so far away that no one would suspect him of
watching it.

But this promenade, which was quite natural, and which he would have
continued for an hour in ordinary circumstances, without thinking
anything about it, soon alarmed him. It seemed as if people looked at
him, and two persons stopping to talk made him wonder if they spoke of
him. Why did they not continue their way? Why, from time to time, did
they turn their heads toward him?

He left the place, and neither wishing nor being able to decide to go
far away from “the house,” he concluded to go to a small cafe which was
close by.

On entering, he seated himself at a table near the door that appeared
to be an excellent observatory, from where he could easily survey the
street. A waiter asked him what he would have, and he ordered coffee.

He gave this order mechanically, without thinking what he was saying,
and not till afterward did he wonder if it were natural to take coffee
at this hour. The men seated at the other tables drank appetizers or
beer. Had he not made a blunder?

But everything seemed a blunder, as everything seemed dangerous. Could
he not regain his composure and his reason? He drank his coffee slowly;
then he asked for a newspaper. The street was quiet, and people left the
cafe one by one.

Behind his newspaper he reflected. It was his feverish curiosity that
made him admit that Caffie’s death would be discovered during the
evening. In reality, it might easily remain undiscovered until the next
day.

But he could not stay in the cafe until the next day, nor even until
midnight. Perhaps he had remained there too long already.

He did not wish to go yet, so he ordered writing materials, and paid the
waiter, in case he might wish to go hastily--if anything occurred.

What should he write? He wished to test himself, and found that he was
able to write clearly, and to select the proper words; but when he came
to read it over, his will failed him.

Time passed. Suddenly there was a movement under the porte-cochere of
“the house,” and a man ran through the street. Two or three persons
stopped in a group.

Without hurrying too much, Saniel went out, and in a strong voice asked
what had happened.

“An agent of business has been assassinated in his office. Word has been
sent to the police bureau in the Rue du Hasard.”




CHAPTER XIV. THE EXAMINATION

Saniel was there to observe, without having decided what he should do.
Instantly, with the decision that had “failed him so often during his
vigil,” he resolved to go to Caffie’s. Was he not a doctor, and the
physician of the dead-man? What could be more natural?

“A money-lender!” he exclaimed. “Is it Monsieur Caffie?”

“Exactly.”

“But I am his doctor.”

“A doctor! Here is a doctor!” cried several voices.

The crowd parted, and Saniel passed under the porte-cochere, where the
concierge, half fainting, was seated on a chair, surrounded by all the
maids of the house and several neighbors, to whom she related the news.

By using his elbows he was able to approach her.

“Who has said Monsieur Caffie is dead?” he asked with authority.

“No one has said he is dead; at least, I have not.”

“Well, then?”

“There is a stain of blood that has run from his office down to the
landing; and as he is at home, since the light of his lamp is seen
in the court, and he never leaves it burning when he goes to dinner,
something must have happened. And why are his curtains drawn? He always
leaves them open.”

At this moment two policemen appeared, preceded by a locksmith armed
with a bunch of keys, and a little man with a shrewd, sharp appearance,
wearing spectacles, and a hat from under which fell blond curls. The
commissioner of police probably.

“On which story?” he asked the concierge.

“On the first.”

“Come with us.”

He started to go upstairs, accompanied by the concierge, the locksmith,
and one of the policemen; Saniel wished to follow them, but the other
policeman barred the way.

“Pardon, Monsieur Commissioner,” Saniel said.

“What do you wish, sir?”

“I am Monsieur Caffie’s physician.”

“Your name?”

“Doctor Saniel.”

“Let the doctor pass,” the commissioner said, “but alone. Make every one
go out, and shut the porte-cochere.”

On reaching the landing the commissioner stopped to look at the brown
stain which, running under the door, spread over the tiling, as Caffie
never had had a mat.

“It is certainly a stain of blood,” Saniel said, who stopped to examine
it and dipped his finger in it.

“Open the door,” the commissioner said to the locksmith.

The latter examined the lock, looked among his keys, selected one, and
unlocked the door.

“Let no one enter,” the commissioner said. “Doctor, have the goodness to
follow me.”

And, going ahead, he entered the first office, that of the clerk,
followed by Saniel. Two little rills of blood, already thickened,
starting from Caffie’s chair, and running across the tiled floor, which
sloped a little toward the side of the staircase, joined in the stain
which caused the discovery of the crime. The commissioner and Saniel
took care not to step in it.

“The unfortunate man has had his throat cut,” Saniel said. “Death must
have occurred two or three hours ago. There is nothing to do.”

“Speak for yourself, doctor.”

And, stooping, he picked up the knife.

“Is it not a butcher’s knife?” asked Saniel, who could only use this
word.

“It looks like it.”

He had raised Caffie’s head and examined the wound.

“You see,” he said, “that the victim has been butchered. The stroke was
from left to right, by a firm hand which must be accustomed to handle
this knife. But it is not only a strong and practised hand that has done
this deed; it was guided by an intelligence that knew how to proceed
to insure a quick, almost instantaneous death, and at the same time a
silent one.”

“You think it was done by a butcher?”

“By a professional killer; the larynx has been cut above the glottis,
and with the same stroke the two carotid arteries, with the jugular
veins. As the assassin had to raise the head, the victim was not able
to cry out; considerable blood has flowed, and death must have ensued in
one or two minutes.”

“The scene appears to me very well reconstructed.”

“The blood should have burst out in this direction,” Saniel continued,
pointing to the door. “But as this door was open, nothing is to be
seen.”

While Saniel spoke, the commissioner threw a glance about the room--the
glance of the police, which takes in everything.

“The safe is open,” he said. “The affair becomes clear; the
assassination was followed by theft.”

There was a door opposite to the entrance, which the commissioner
opened; it was that of Caffie’s bedroom.

“I will give you a man to help you carry the body into this room, where
you can continue your examination more easily, while I will continue my
investigations in this office.”

Saniel would have liked to remain in the office to assist at these
investigations, but it was impossible to raise an objection. The chair
was rolled into the bedroom, where two candles had been lighted on the
mantel, and when the body was laid on the bed, the commissioner returned
to the office.

Saniel made his examination last as long a time as possible, to the end
that he need not leave the house; but he could not prolong it beyond
certain limits. When they were reached, he returned to the clerk’s
office, where the commissioner had installed himself, and was hearing
the concierge’s deposition.

“And so,” he said, “from five to seven o’clock no one asked for M.
Caffie?”

“No one. But I left my lodge at a quarter past five to light the gas
on the stairs; that took me twenty minutes, because I am stiff in my
joints, and during this time some one might have gone up and down the
stairs without my seeing them.”

“Well,” the commissioner said, turning to Saniel, “have you found any
distinguishing feature?”

“No; there is only the wound on the neck.”

“Will you draw up your medico-legal report while I continue my inquest?”

“Willingly.”

And, without waiting, he seated himself at the clerk’s desk, facing the
commissioner’s secretary, who had arrived a few minutes previous.

“I am going to make you take the oath,” the commissioner said.

After this formality Saniel began his report:

“We, the undersigned, Victor Saniel, doctor of medicine of the Paris
Faculty, residing in Paris in the Rue Louis-le-Grand, after having taken
an oath to fulfil in all honor and conscience the mission confided to
us--”

All the time that he was writing he paid attention to everything that
was said, and did not lose one word of the concierge’s deposition.

“I am certain,” she said, “that from half-past five until now no one has
gone up or down the stairs but the people who live in the house.”

“But before half-past five?”

“I have told you that from a quarter past five until half-past I was not
in my lodge.”

“And before a quarter past five o’clock?”

“Several persons passed whom I did not know.”

“Did any one among them ask you for Monsieur Caffie?”

“No; that is to say, yes. There was one who asked me if Monsieur Caffie
was at home; but I know him well; that is why I answered No.”

“And who is he?”

“One of Monsieur Caffies old clerks.”

“His name?”

“Monsieur Florentin--Monsieur Florentin Cormier.”

Saniel’s hand was arrested at this name, but he did not raise his head.

“At what hour did he come?” asked the commissioner.

“Near three o’clock, before rather than after.”

“Did you see him go away?”

“Certainly, he spoke to me.”

“What time was it?”

“Half-past three.”

“Do you think that death could have occurred at this moment?” the
commissioner asked, turning to Saniel.

“No; I think it must have been between five and six o’clock.”

“It is wrong for the commissioner to suspect Monsieur Florentin,” cried
the concierge. “He is a good young man, incapable of harming a fly.
And then, there is a good reason why death could not have taken place
between three o’clock and half-past; it is that Monsieur Caffie’s lamp
was lighted, and you know the poor gentleman was not a man to light his
lamp in broad daylight, looking as he was--”

She stopped abruptly, striking her forehead with her hand.

“That is what I remember, and you will see that Monsieur Florentin has
nothing to do with this affair. As I went upstairs at a quarter past
five to light my gas, some one came behind me and rang Monsieur Caffie’s
bell, and rapped three or four times at equal distances, which is the
signal to open the door.”

Again Saniel’s pen stopped, and he was obliged to lean his hand on the
table to prevent its trembling.

“Who was it?”

“Ah! That I do not know,” she answered. “I did not see him, but I heard
him, the step of a man. It was this rascal who killed him, you may be
sure.”

This seemed likely.

“He went out while I was on the stairs; he knew the customs of the
house.”

Saniel continued his report.

After having questioned and cross-questioned the concierge without being
able to make her say more, the commissioner dismissed her, and leaving
Saniel at his work, he passed into Caffie’s office, where he remained a
long time.

When he returned he brought a small note-book that he consulted. Without
doubt it was the book of Caffie’s safe, simple and primitive, like
everything relating to the old man’s habits, governed by the narrowest
economy in his expenses, as well as in his work.

“According to this note-book,” the commissioner said to his secretary,
“thirty-five or thirty-six thousand francs must have been taken from the
safe; but there are left deeds and papers for a large sum.”

Saniel, who had finished his report, did not take his eyes from the
note-book, and what he could see reassured him. Evidently these accounts
were reduced to a minimum: a date, a name, a sum, and after this name
a capital P, which, without doubt, meant “paid.” It was hardly possible
that with such a system Caffie had ever taken the trouble to enter the
number of the bills that had passed through his hands; in any case, if
he did, it was not in this note-book. Would another one be found?

“My report is finished,” he said. “Here it is.”

“Since you are here, perhaps you can give me some information concerning
the habits of the victim and the persons he received.”

“Not at all. I have known him but a short time, and he was my patient,
as I was his client, by accident. He undertook an affair for me, and
I gave him advice; he was in the last stage of diabetes. The assassin
hastened his death only a short time-a few days.”

“That is nothing; he hastened it.”

“Oh, certainly! Otherwise, if he is skilful in cutting throats, perhaps
he is less so in making a diagnosis of their maladies.”

“That is probable,” responded the commissioner, smiling. “You think it
was a butcher?”

“It seems probable.”

“The knife?”

“He might have stolen it or found it.”

“But the mode of operating?”

“That, it seems to me, is the point from where we should start.”

Saniel could remain no longer, and he rose to leave.

“You have my address,” he said; “but I must tell you, if you want me, I
leave to-morrow for Nice. But I shall be absent only just long enough to
go and return.”

“If we want you, it will not be for several days. We shall not get on
very rapidly, we have so little to guide us.”




CHAPTER XV. A NEW PLAN

Saniel walked home briskly. If, more than once during this interview,
his emotion was poignant, he could not but be satisfied with the result.
The concierge had not seen him, that was henceforth unquestionable; the
hypothesis of the butcher’s knife was put in a way to make his fortune;
and it seemed probable that Caffie had not kept the numbers of the
bank-notes.

But if they had been noted, and should the notebook containing them be
discovered later, the danger was not immediate. While writing his report
and listening to the concierge’s deposition, by a sort of inspiration he
thought of a way of disposing of them. He would divide them into small
packages, place them in envelopes, and address them with different
initials to the poste restante, where they would remain until he could
call for them without compromising himself.

In the deposition of the concierge, in the track indicated by the knife,
in the poste restante, he had just motives for satisfaction, that made
him breathe freely. Decidedly, fate seemed to be with him, and he should
have been able to say that everything was going well, if he had not
committed the imprudence of entering the cafe. Why had he gone there
and remained long enough to attract attention? What might not be the
consequences of this stupidity?

As soon as he reached home and his door was closed, he carried out his
intentions regarding the bank-notes, dividing them into ten packages.
His first thought was to place them in the nearest letterbox, but
reflection showed him that this would be unwise, and he decided to mail
each one in a different quarter of the city.

After his long walk of the morning, and the emotions of the evening, he
felt a fatigue that he had never known before, but he comprehended that
he was not at liberty to yield to this weariness. A new situation was
made for him, and henceforth he no longer belonged to himself. For the
rest of his life he would be the prisoner of his crime. And it was this
crime which, from this evening, would command, and he must obey.

Why had he not foreseen this situation when, weighing the pro and con
like an intelligent man who can scrutinize the future under all its
phases, he had examined what must happen? But surprising as it was, the
discovery was no less certain, and the sad and troublesome proof
was that, however intelligent one may be, one can always learn by
experience.

What was there yet to learn? He confessed that he found himself face to
face with the unknown, and all that he wished was, that this lesson he
had learned from experience might be the hardest. It would be folly to
imagine that it was the last. Time would show.

When he returned home, after posting his letters, it was long past one
o’clock. He went to bed immediately, and slept heavily, without waking
or dreaming.

It was broad daylight when he opened his eyes the next morning.
Surprised at having slept so late, he jumped up and looked at his watch,
which said eight o’clock. But as he should not leave until a quarter
past eleven, he had plenty of time.

How should he employ it?

It was the first time in years that he had asked himself such a
question; he, who each day always found that he needed three or four
hours more to carry out his programme.

He dressed slowly, and then thought of writing to Phillis to tell her of
his trip to Nice. But suddenly he changed his mind, and decided to go to
see her.

The preceding year he attended Madame Cormier, who had been stricken
with paralysis, and he could occasionally present himself at her house
without appearing to call upon Phillis. It was easy to say that he was
passing by, and wished to learn news of the patient whom he had cured.

At nine o’clock he knocked at her door.

“Enter,” a man’s voice said.

He was surprised, for in his visits to Madame Cormier he had never seen
a man there. He crossed the hall and knocked at the dining-room door.
This time it was Phillis who bid him come in.

He opened the door and saw Phillis, in a gray blouse, seated before a
large table placed by the window. She was painting some cards.

Hearing steps, she turned her head and instantly rose, but she
restrained the cry-the name that was on her lips.

“Mamma,” she said, “here is Doctor Saniel.”

Madame Cormier entered, walking with difficulty; for, if Saniel had put
her on her feet, he had not given her the suppleness or the grace of
youth.

After a few words, Saniel explained that, having to pay a visit to
the Batignolles, he would not come so near his former patient without
calling to see her.

While Madame Cormier told at great length how she felt, and also how
she did not feel, Phillis looked at Saniel, uneasy to see his face so
convulsed. Surely, something very serious had happened; his visit
said this. But what? Her anguish was so much the greater, because he
certainly avoided looking at her. Why? She had done nothing, and could
find nothing with which to reproach herself.

At this moment the door opened, and a man still young, tall, with a
curled beard, entered the room.

“My son,” Madame Cormier said.

“My brother Florentin, of whom we have spoken so often,” Phillis said.

Florentin! Was he then becoming imbecile, that he had not thought the
voice of the man who bid him enter was that of Phillis’s brother? Was he
so profoundly overwhelmed that such a simple reasoning was impossible
to him? Decidedly, it was important for him to go away as quickly as
possible; the journey would calm his nerves.

“They wrote to me,” Florentin said, “and since my return they have told
me how good you were to my mother. Permit me to thank you from a touched
and grateful heart. I hope that before long this gratitude will be
something more than a vain word.”

“Do not let us speak of that,” Saniel said, looking at Phillis with a
frankness and an open countenance that reassured heron a certain
point. “It is I who am obliged to Madame Cormier. If the word were not
barbarous, I should say that her illness has been a good thing for me.”

To turn the conversation, and because he wished to speak to Phillis
alone, he approached her table and talked with her about her work.

Saniel then gave Madame Cormier some advice, and rose to go.

Phillis followed him, and Florentin was about to accompany them, but
Phillis stopped him.

“I wish to ask Doctor Saniel a question,” she said.

When they were on the landing she closed the door.

“What is the matter?” she asked in a hurried and trembling voice.

“I wished to tell you that I start for Monaco at eleven o’clock.”

“You are going away?”

“I have received two hundred francs from a patient, and I am going
to risk them at play. Two hundred francs will not pay Jardine or the
others, but with them I may win several thousands of francs.”

“Oh! Poor dear! How desperate you must be--you, such as you are, to have
such an idea!”

“Am I wrong?”

“Never wrong to my eyes, to my heart, to my love. O my beloved, may
fortune be with you!”

“Give me your hand.”

She looked around, listening. There was no one, no noise.

Then, drawing him toward her, she put her lips on his:

“All yours, yours!”

“I will return Tuesday.”

“Tuesday, at five o’clock, I shall be there.”




CHAPTER XVI. THE SMILES OF FORTUNE

No one knew so little about play as Saniel. He knew that people played
at Monaco, and that was all. He bought his ticket for Monaco, and left
the train at that place.

On leaving the station he looked all about him, to see what kind of a
place it was. Seeing nothing that looked like a gambling-house as he
understood it, that is, like the Casino de Royal, the only establishment
of the kind that he had ever seen, he asked a passer-by:

“Where is the gambling-house?”

“There is none at Monaco.”

“I thought there was.”

“There is one at Monte Carlo.”

“Is it far?”

“Over yonder.”

With his hand the man indicated, on the slope of the mountain, a green
spot where, in the midst of the foliage, were seen roofs and facades of
imposing buildings.

Saniel thanked him and followed his directions, while the man, calling
another, related the question that had been addressed to him, and both
laughed, shrugging their shoulders. Could any one be so stupid as these
Parisians! Another one who was going to be plucked, and who came from
Paris expressly for that! Was he not funny, with his big legs and arms?

Without troubling himself about the laughter that he heard behind him,
Saniel continued his way. In spite of his night on the train, he felt no
fatigue; on the contrary, his mind and body were active. The journey had
calmed the agitation of his nerves, and it was with perfect tranquillity
he looked back upon all that had passed before his departure. In the
state of satisfaction that was his now, he had nothing more to fear from
stupidity or acts of folly; and, since he had recovered his will, all
would go well. No more backward glances, and fewer still before. The
present only should absorb him.

The present, at this moment, was play. What did they play? He knew
roulette, but he knew not if the game was roulette. He would do as
others did. If he were ridiculed, it was of little importance; and in
reality he should desire to be ridiculed. People remember with pleasure
those at whom they have laughed, and he had come here to find some one
who would remember him.

When he entered the salon where the playing was going on, he observed
that a religious silence reigned there. Round a large table covered with
a carpet of green cloth, which was divided by lines and figures, some
men were seated on high chairs, making them appear like officers;
others, on lower chairs, or simply standing about the table, pushed
or picked up the louis and bank bills on the green cloth, and a strong
voice repeated, in a monotonous tone:

“Messieurs, faites votre jeu! Le jeu est fait! Rien ne va plus!”

Then a little ivory ball was thrown into a cylinder, where it rolled
with a metallic noise. Although he had never seen roulette, it required
no effort to divine that this was the game.

And, before putting several louis on the table, he looked about him to
see how it was played. But after the tenth time he understood as little
as at first. With the rakes the croupiers collected the stakes of
certain players; with these same rakes they doubled, separated, or even
paid, in proportions of which he took no account, certain others, and
that was all.

But it mattered little. Having seen how the money was placed on the
table, that was sufficient.

He had five louis in his hand when the croupier said:

“Messieurs, faites votre jeu.”

He placed them on the number thirty-two, or, at least, he believed that
he placed them on this number.

“Rien ne va plus!” The ball rolled in the cylinder.

“Thirty-one!” cried the croupier, adding some other words that Saniel
did not understand. So little did he understand roulette that he thought
he had lost. He had placed his stake on the thirty-two, and it was the
thirty-one that had appeared; the bank had won. He was surprised to see
the croupier push a heap of gold toward him, which amounted to nearly a
hundred louis, and accompany this movement with a glance which, without
any doubt, meant to say:

“For you, sir.”

What should he do? Since he had lost, he could not take this, money that
was given to him by mistake.

In placing his stake on the table, he had leaned over the shoulder of a
gentleman whose hair and beard were of a most extraordinary black, who,
without playing, pricked a card with a pin. This gentleman turned toward
him, and with an amiable smile, and in a most gracious tone said:

“It is yours, sir.”

Decidedly, he was mistaken in thinking he had lost; and he must take
this heap of louis, which he did, but neglecting to take, also, his
first stake.

The game continued.

“Thirty-two,” called the croupier.

Saniel perceived that his five louis had remained on the thirty-two;
he believed that he had won, since this number was called, and his
ignorance was such that he did not know that in roulette a number is
paid thirty-six times the stake: the croupier would, therefore, push
toward him one hundred and eighty Louis.

But, to his great surprise, he pushed him no more money than at first.
This was incomprehensible. When he lost, money was paid to him, and when
he won, he was paid only half his due.

His face betrayed his astonishment so plainly that he saw a mocking
smile in the eyes of the black-haired man, who had again turned toward
him.

As he played merely for the sake of playing, and not to win or lose, he
pocketed all that was pushed toward him and his stake.

“Since you are not going to play any more,” said the amiable gentleman,
leaving his chair, “will you permit me to say a word to you?”

Saniel bowed, and together they left the table. When they were far
enough away to converse without disturbing the players, the gentleman
bowed ceremoniously:

“Permit me to present myself-Prince Mazzazoli.”

Saniel replied by giving his name and position.

“Well, doctor,” the prince said with a strong Italian accent, “you
will pardon me, I hope, for making the simple observation that my age
authorizes: you play like a child.”

“Like an ignoramus,” Saniel replied, without being angry. For, however
unusual this observation might be, he had already decided that it might
be a good thing in the future to call upon the testimony of a prince.

“I am sure you are still asking yourself why you received eighteen times
the sum of your stake at the first play, and why you did not receive
thirty-six times the sum at the second.”

“That is true.”

“Well, I will tell you.” And he proceeded to explain.

Saniel did not wait for the conclusion to learn the fact that this
very-much-dyed Italian prince was a liar.

“I do not intend to play again,” he said.

“With your luck that would be more than a fault.”

“I wanted a certain sum; I have won it, and that satisfies me.”

“You will not be so foolish as to refuse the hand that Fortune holds
out?”

“Are you sure she holds it out to me?” Saniel asked, finding that it was
the prince.

“Do not doubt it. I will show you--”

“Thank you; but I never break a resolution.”

In another moment Saniel would have turned his back on the man, but he
was a witness whom it would be well to treat with caution.

“I have nothing more to do here,” he said, politely. “Permit me to
retire, after having thanked you for your offer, whose kindness I
appreciate.”

“Well,” cried the prince, “since you will not risk your fate, let me do
it for you. This money may be a fetich. Take off five louis, only
five louis, and confide them to me. I will play them according to my
combinations, which are certain, and this evening I will give you your
part of the proceeds. Where are you staying? I live at the Villa des
Palmes.”

“Nowhere; I have just arrived.”

“Then let us meet here this evening at ten o’clock, in this room, and we
will liquidate our association.”

His first impulse was to refuse. Of what use to give alms to this old
monkey? But, after all, it did not cost much to pay his witness five
louis, and he gave them to him.

“A thousand thanks! This evening, at ten o’clock.”

As Saniel left the room he found himself face to face with his old
comrade Duphot, who was accompanied by a woman, the same whom he had
cured.

“What! you here?” both the lover and his mistress exclaimed.

Saniel related why he was at Monaco, and what he had done since his
arrival.

“With my money! Ah! She is very well,” Duphot cried.

“And you will play no more?” the woman asked.

“I have all I want.”

“Then you will play for me.”

He wished to decline, but they drew him to the roulette table, and each
put a louis in his hand.

“Play.”

“How?”

“As inspiration counsels you. You have the luck.”

But his luck had died. The two louis were lost.

They gave him two others, which won eight.

“You see, dear friend.”

He went on, with varying luck, winning and losing.

At the end of a quarter of an hour they permitted him to go.

“And what are you going to do now?” Duphot asked.

“To send what I owe to my creditors by telegraph.”

“Do you know where the telegraph is?”

“No.”

“I will go with you.”

This was a second witness that Saniel was too wise to shake off.

When he had sent his telegram to Jardine, he had nothing more to do
at Monte Carlo, and as he could not leave before eleven o’clock in the
evening, he was idle, not knowing how to employ his time. So he bought
a Nice newspaper and seated himself in the garden, under a gaslight,
facing the dark and tranquil sea. Perhaps he could find in it some
telegraph despatch which would tell him what had occurred in the Rue
Sainte-Anne since his departure.

At the end of the paper, under “Latest News,” he read:

“The crime of the Rue Sainte-Anne seems to take a new turn; the
investigations made with more care have led to the discovery of a
trousers’ button, to which is attached a piece of cloth. It shows,
therefore, that before the crime there was a struggle between the victim
and the assassin. As this button has certain letters and marks, it is a
valuable clew for the police.”

This proof of a struggle between the victim and the assassin made Saniel
smile. Who could tell how long this button had been there?

Suddenly he left his seat, and entering a copse he examined his
clothing. Was it he who had lost it?

But soon he was ashamed of this unconscious movement. The button which
the police were so proud to discover, did not belong to him. This new
track on which they were about to enter did not lead to him.




CHAPTER XVII. PHILLIS’S FEARS

On Tuesday, a little before five o’clock, as she had promised, Phillis
rang at Saniel’s door, and he left his laboratory where he was at work,
to let her in.

She threw herself on his neck.

“Well?” she asked, in a trembling voice.

He told her how he had played and won, without stating the exact sum;
also the propositions of the Prince Mazzazoli, the meeting with Duphot,
and the telegram to Jardine.

“Oh! What happiness!” she said, pressing him in her arms. “You are
free!”

“No more creditors! I am my own master. You see it was a good
inspiration. Justice willed it.”

Then interrupting him:

“Apropos of justice, you did not speak of Caffie the morning of your
departure.”

“I was so preoccupied I had no time to think of Caffie.”

“Is it not curious, the coincidence of his death with the condemnation
that we pronounced against him? Does it not prove exactly the justice of
things?”

“If you choose.”

“As the money you won at Monaco proves to you that what is just will
happen. Caffie is punished for all his rascalities and crimes, and you
are rewarded for your sufferings.”

“Would it not have been just if Caffie had been punished sooner, and if
I had suffered less?”

She remained silent.

“You see,” he said smiling, “that your philosophy is weak.”

“It is not of my philosophy that I am thinking, but of Caffie and
ourselves.”

“And how can Caffie be associated with you or yours?”

“He is, or rather he may be, if this justice in which I believe in spite
of your joking permits him to be.”

“You are talking in enigmas.”

“What have you heard about Caffie since you went away?”

“Nothing, or almost nothing.”

“You know it is thought that the crime was committed by a butcher.”

“The commissioner picked up the knife before me, and it is certainly a
butcher’s knife. And more than that, the stroke that cut Caffie’s throat
was given by a hand accustomed to butchery. I have indicated this in my
report.”

“Since then, more careful investigations have discovered a trousers’
button--”

“Which might have been torn off in a struggle between Caffie and his
assassin, I read in a newspaper. But as for me, I do not believe in this
struggle. Caffie’s position in his chair, where he was assaulted and
where he died, indicates that the old scamp was surprised. Otherwise,
if he had not been, if he had struggled, he could have cried out, and,
without doubt, he would have been heard.”

“If you knew how happy I am to hear you say that!” she cried.

“Happy! What difference can it make to you?” and he looked at her in
surprise. “Of what importance is it to you whether Caffie was killed
with or without a struggle? You condemned him; he is dead. That should
satisfy you.”

“I was very wrong to pronounce this condemnation, which I did without
attaching any importance to it.”

“Do you think that hastened its execution?”

“I am not so foolish as that, but I should be better pleased if I had
not condemned him.”

“Do you regret it?”

“I regret that he is dead.”

“Decidedly, the enigma continues; but you know I do not understand it,
and, if you wish, we will stop there. We have something better to do
than to talk of Caffie.”

“On the contrary, let me talk to you of him, because we want your
advice.”

Again he looked at her, trying to read her face and to divine why she
insisted on speaking of Caffie, when he had just expressed a wish not to
speak of him. What was there beneath this insistence?

“I will listen,” he said; “and, since you wish to ask my advice on the
subject, you must tell me immediately what you mean.”

“You are right; and I should have told you before, but embarrassment and
shame restrained me. And I reproach myself, for with you I should feel
neither embarrassment nor reproach.”

“Assuredly.”

“But before everything else, I must tell you--you must know--that my
brother Florentin is a good and honest boy; you must believe it, you
must be convinced of it.”

“I am, since you tell me so. Besides, he produced the best impression on
me during the short time I saw him the other day at your house.”

“Would not one see immediately that he has a good nature?”

“Certainly.”

“Frank and upright; weak, it is true, and a little effeminate also,
that is, lacking energy, letting himself be carried away by goodness and
tenderness. This weakness made him commit a fault before his departure
for America. I have kept it from you until this moment, but you must
know it now. Loving a woman who controlled him and made him do what she
wished, he let himself be persuaded to-take a sum of forty-five francs
that she demanded, that she insisted on having that evening, hoping to
be able to replace it three days later, without his employer discovering
it.”

“His employer was Caffie?”

“No; it was three months after he left Caffie, and he was with another
man of business of whom I have never spoken to you, and now you
understand why. The money he expected failed him; his fault was
discovered, and his employer lodged a complaint against him.”

“We made him withdraw his complaint, never mind how, and Florentin went
to America to seek his fortune. And since you have seen him, you admit
that he might be capable of the fault that he committed, without being
capable-of becoming an assassin.”

He was about to reply, but she closed his lips with a quick gesture.

“You will see why I speak of this, and you will understand why I do
not drop the subject of Caffie, and of this button, on which the police
count to find the criminal. This button belonged to Florentin.”

“To your brother?”

“Yes, to Florentin, who, the day of the crime, had been to see Caffie.”

“That is true; the concierge told the commissioner of police that he
called about three o’clock.”

Phillis gave a cry of despair.

“They know he was there? Then it is more serious than we imagined or
believed.”

“In answering a question as to whom Caffie had received that day, the
concierge named your brother. But as this visit took place between three
and half-past, and the crime was certainly committed between five and
half-past, no one can accuse your brother of being the assassin, since
he left before Caffie lighted his lamp. As this lamp could not light
itself, it proves that he could not have butchered a man who was living
an hour after the concierge saw your brother and talked with him.”

“What you say is a great relief; if you could know how alarmed we have
been!”

“You were too hasty to alarm yourself.”

“Too hasty? But when Florentin read the account to us and came to the
button, he exclaimed, ‘This button is mine!’ and we experienced a
shock that made us lose our heads. We saw the police falling on us,
questioning Florentin, reproaching him with the past, which would be
retailed in all the newspapers, and you must understand how we felt.”

“But cannot your brother explain how he lost this button at Caffie’s?”

“Certainly, and in the most natural way. He went to see Caffie, to ask
him for a letter of recommendation, saying that he had been his clerk
for several years. Caffie gave it to him, and then, in the course of
conversation, Caffie spoke of a bundle of papers that he could not find.
Florentin had had charge of these papers, and had placed them on a high
shelf in the closet. As Caffie could not find them, and wanted them,
Florentin brought a small ladder, and, mounting it, found them. He was
about to descend the ladder, when he made a misstep, and in trying to
save himself, one of the buttons of his trousers was pulled off.”

“And he did not pick it up?”

“He did not even notice it at first. But later, in the street, seeing
one leg of his trousers longer than the other, he thought of the ladder,
and found that he had lost a button. He would not return to Caffie’s to
look for it, of course.”

“Of course.”

“How could he foresee that Caffie would be assassinated? That the crime
would be so skilfully planned and executed that the criminal would
escape? That two days later the police would find a button on which they
would build a story that would make him the criminal? Florentin had not
thought of all that.”

“That is understood.”

“The same evening he replaced the button by another, and it was only on
reading the newspaper that he felt there might be something serious in
this apparently insignificant fact. And we shared his alarm.”

“Have you spoken to any one of this button?”

“Certainly not; we know too much. I tell you of it because I tell you
everything; and if we are menaced, we have no help to expect, except
from you. Florentin is a good boy, but he is weak and foolish. Mamma
is like him in more than one respect, and as for me, although I am more
resistant, I confess that, in the face of the law and the police, I
should easily lose my head, like children who begin to scream when they
are left in the dark. Is not the law, when you know nothing of it, a
night of trouble, full of horrors, and peopled with phantoms?”

“I do not believe there is the danger that you imagined in the first
moment of alarm.”

“It was natural.”

“Very natural, I admit, but reflection must show how little foundation
there is for it. The button has not the name of the tailor who furnished
it?”

“No, but it has the initials and the mark of the manufacturer; an A and
a P, with a crown and a cock.”

“Well! Among two or three thousand tailors in Paris, how is it possible
for the police to find those who use these buttons? And when the tailors
are found, how could they designate the owner of this button, this one
exactly, and not another? It is looking for a needle in a bundle of hay.
Where did your brother have these trousers made? Did he bring them from
America?”

“The poor boy brought nothing from America but wretchedly shabby
clothes, and we had to clothe him from head to foot. We were obliged to
economize, and a little tailor in the Avenue de Clichy, called Valerius,
made this suit.”

“It seems to me scarcely probable that the police will find this little
tailor. But if they do, would he recognize the button as coming from
his stock? And, if they get as far as your brother, they must prove that
there was a struggle; that the button was torn off in this struggle;
that your brother was in the Rue Sainte-Anne between five and six
o’clock; in which case, without doubt, he will find it easy to prove
where he was at that moment.”

“He was with us--with mamma.”

“You see, then, you need not feel alarmed.”




CHAPTER XVIII. A GRAVE DISCUSSION

Phillis hurried to return to the Rue des Moines, to share with her
mother and brother the confidence that Saniel caused her to feel.

She pulled the bell with a trembling hand, for the time was past when
in this quiet house, where all the lodgers knew each other, the key was
left in the door, and one had only to knock before entering. Since the
newspapers had spoken of the button, all was changed; the feeling of
liberty and security had disappeared; the door was always closed, and
when the bell rang they looked at each other in fear and with trembling.

When Florentin opened the door, the table was set for dinner.

“I was afraid something had happened to you,” Madame Cormier said.

“I was detained.”

She took off her hat and cloak hastily.

“You have learned nothing?” the mother asked, bringing in the soup.

“No.”

“They spoke to you of nothing?” Florentin continued in a low voice.

“They spoke to me of nothing else; or I heard only that when I was not
addressed directly.”

“What was said?”

“No one believes that the investigations of the police bear on the
button.”

“You see, Florentin,” Madame Cormier interrupted, smiling at her son.

But he shook his head.

“However, the opinion of all has a value,” Phillis cried.

“Speak lower,” Florentin said.

“It is thought that it is impossible for the police to find, among the
two or three thousand tailors in Paris, all those who use the buttons
marked A. P. And if they did find them, they could not designate all
their customers to whom they have furnished these buttons. It is really
looking for a needle in a bundle of hay.”

“When one takes plenty of time, one finds a needle in a bundle of hay,”
 Florentin said.

“You ask me what I heard, and I tell you. But I do not depend entirely
on that. As I passed near the Rue Louis-le-Grand, I went to Doctor
Saniel’s; it being his office hour I hoped to find him.”

“You told him the situation?” Florentin exclaimed.

In any other circumstances she would have replied frankly, explaining
that she had perfect confidence in Saniel; but when she saw her
brother’s agitation, she could not exasperate him by this avowal, above
all, because she could not at the same time give her reasons for her
faith in him. She must reassure him before everything.

“No,” she said, “but I spoke of Caffie to Doctor Saniel without his
being surprised. As he made the first deposition, was it not natural
that my curiosity should wish to learn a little more than the newspapers
tell?”

“Never mind, the act must appear strange.”

“I think not. But, anyhow, the interest that we have to learn all
made me overlook this; and I think, when I have told you the doctor’s
opinion, you will not regret my visit.”

“And this opinion?” Madame Cormier asked.

“His opinion is, that there was no struggle between Caffie and the
assassin, whereas the position of Caffie in the chair where he was
attacked proves that he was surprised. Therefore, if there was no
struggle, there was no button torn off, and all the scaffolding of the
police falls to the ground.”

Madame Cormier breathed a profound sigh of deliverance.

“You see,” she said to her son.

“And the doctor’s opinion is not the opinion of the first-comer, it is
not even that of an ordinary physician. It is that of the physician who
has certified to the death, and who, more than any one, has power,
has authority, to say how it was given--by surprise, without struggle,
without a button being pulled off.”

“It is not Doctor Saniel who directs the search of the police, or
who inspires it,” replied Florentin. “His opinion does not produce a
criminal, while the button can--at least for those who believe in the
struggle; and between the two the police will not hesitate.

“Already the newspapers laugh at them for not having discovered the
assassin, who has rejoined all the others they have let escape. They
must follow the track they have started on, and this track--”

He lowered his voice:

“It will lead them here.”

“To do that they must pass by the Avenue de Clichy, and that seems
unlikely.”

“It is the possible that torments me, and not the unlikely, and you
cannot but recognize that what I fear is possible. I was at Caffies
the day of the crime. I lost there a button torn off by violence.
This button picked up by the police proves, according to them, the
criminality of the one who lost it. They will find that I am the one--”

“They will not find you.”

“Let us admit that they do find me. How should I defend myself?”

“By proving that you were not in the Rue Sainte-Anne between five and
six o’clock, since you were here.”

“And what witnesses will prove this alibi? I have only one--mamma.
What is the testimony of a mother worth in favor of her son in such
circumstances?”

“You will have that of the doctor, affirming that there was no struggle,
and consequently no button torn off.”

“Affirming, but carrying no proof to support his theory; the opinion of
one doctor, which the opinion of another doctor may refute and destroy.
And then, to prove that there was no struggle; Doctor Saniel will say
that Caffie was surprised. Who could surprise Caffie? To open Caffies
door when the clerk was away, it was necessary to ring first, and then
to knock three times in a peculiar way. No stranger could know that, and
who could know it better than I?”

Step by step Phillis defended the ground against her brother; but little
by little the confidence which at first sustained her weakened. With
Saniel she was brave. Between her brother and mother, in this room that
had witnessed their fears, not daring to speak loud, she was downcast,
and let herself be overcome by their anxieties.

“Truly,” she said, “it seems as if we were guilty and not innocent.”

“And while we are tormenting ourselves, the criminal, probably, in
perfect safety laughs at the police investigations; he had not thought
of this button; chance throws it in his way. Luck is for him, and
against us--once more.”

This was the plaint that was often on Florentin’s lips. Although he had
never been a gambler--and for sufficient reason--in his eyes everything
was decided by luck. There are those who are born under a lucky star,
others under an unlucky one. There are those who, in the battle of life,
receive knocks without being discouraged, because they expect something
the next day, as there are those who become discouraged because they
expect nothing, and know by experience that tomorrow will be for them
what today is, what yesterday was. And Florentin was one of these.

“Why did I not stay in America?” he said.

“Because you were too unhappy, my poor boy!” Madame Cormier said, whose
maternal heart was moved by this cry.

“Am I happier here, or shall I be to-morrow? What does this to-morrow,
full of uncertainty and dangers, hold for us?”

“Why do you insist that it has only dangers?” Phillis asked, in a
conciliating and caressing tone.

“You always expect the good.”

“At least I hope for it, and do not admit deliberately that it is
impossible. I do not say that life is always rose-colored, but neither
is it always black. I believe it is like the seasons. After winter,
which is vile, I confess, come the spring, summer, and autumn.”

“Well, if I had the money necessary for the voyage, I would go and pass
the end of the winter in a country where it would be less disagreeable
than here, and, above all, less dangerous for my constitution.”

“You do not say that seriously, I hope?” cried Madame Cormier.

“On the contrary, very seriously.”

“We are hardly reunited, and you think of a separation,” she said,
sadly.

“It is not of a separation that Florentin thinks,” cried Phillis, “but
of a flight.”

“And why not?”

“Because only the guilty fly.”

“It is exactly the contrary. The intelligent criminals stay, and, as
generally they are resolute men, they know beforehand that they are
able to face the danger; while the innocent, timid like myself, or the
unlucky, lose their heads and fly, because they know beforehand, also,
that if a danger threatens them, it will crush them. That is why I would
return to America if I could pay my passage; at least I should feel easy
there.”

There was a moment of silence, during which each one seemed to have no
thought but to finish dinner.

“Granting that this project is not likely,” Florentin said, “I have
another idea.”

“Why do you have ideas?” Phillis asked.

“I wish you were in my place; we should see if you would not have them.”

“I assure you that I am in your place, and that your trouble is mine,
only it does not betray itself in the same manner. But what is your
idea?”

“It is to find Valerius and tell him all.”

“And who will answer to us for Valerius’s discretion?” asked Madame
Cormier. “Would it not be the greatest imprudence that you could commit?
One cannot play with a secret of this importance.”

“Valerius is an honest man.”

“It is because he cannot work when political, or rather patriotic,
affairs go wrong, that you say this.”

“And why not? With a poor man who lives in a small way by his work, are
not this care and pride in his country marks of an honorable heart?”

“I grant the honorable heart, but it is another reason for being prudent
with him,” Phillis said. “Precisely because he may be what you think,
reserve is necessary. You tell him what is passed. If he accepts it and
your innocence, it is well; he will not betray your secret voluntarily
nor by stupidity. But he will not accept it; he will look beyond. He
will suppose that you wish to deceive him, and he will suspect you. In
that case, would he not go and tell all to the police commissioner of
our quarter? As for me, I think it is a danger that it would be foolish
to risk.”

“And, according to you, what is to be done?”

“Nothing; that is, wait, since there are a thousand chances against one
for our uneasiness, and we exaggerate those that may never be realized.”

“Well, let us wait,” he said. “Moreover, I like that; at the least, I
have no responsibilities. What can happen will happen.”




CHAPTER XIX. THE KNOCK AT THE DOOR

In order to put the button found at Caffies on the track of the
assassin, it required that it should have come from a Parisian tailor,
or, at least, a French one, and that the trousers had not been sold by a
ready-made clothing-house, where the names of customers are not kept.

The task of the police was therefore difficult, as weak, also, were the
chances of success. As Saniel had said, it was like looking for a needle
in a bundle of hay, to go to each tailor in Paris.

But this was not their way of proceeding. In place of trying to find
those who used these buttons, they looked for those who made them or
sold them, and suddenly, without going farther than the directory, they
found this manufacturer: “A. Pelinotte, manufacturer of metal buttons
for trousers; trademark, A.P., crown and cock; Faubourg du Temple.”

At first this manufacturer was not disposed to answer questions of the
agent who went to see him; but when he began to understand that he might
reap some advantage from the affair, like the good merchant that he was,
young and active, he put his books and clerks at his disposition. His
boast was, in effect, that his buttons, thanks to a brass bonnet around
which the thread was rolled instead of passing through the holes, never
cut the thread and could not be broken. When they came off it was with
a piece of the cloth. What better justification of his pretensions,
what better advertisement than his button torn off with a piece of the
trousers of the assassin? The affair would go before the assizes, and in
all the newspapers there would be mention of the “A. P. buttons.”

He was asked for his customers’ names, and after a few days the search
began, guided by a list so exact that useless steps were spared.

One morning a detective reached the Avenue de Clichy, and found the
tailor Valerius in his shop, reading a newspaper. For it was not only
when the country was in danger that Valerius had a passion for reading
papers, but every morning and evening.

Nothing that was published in the papers escaped him, and at the first
words of the agent he understood immediately about what he was to be
questioned.

“It is concerning the affair in the Rue Sainte-Anne that you wish this
information?” he said.

“Frankly, yes.”

“Well, frankly also, I do not know if the secrets of the profession
permit me to answer you.”

The agent, who was by no means stupid, immediately understood the man’s
character, and instead of yielding to the desire to laugh, caused by
this reply honestly made by this good-natured man, whose long, black,
bushy beard and bald head accentuated his gravity, he yielded to the
necessity of the occasion.

“That is a question to discuss.”

“Then let us discuss it. A customer, confiding in my honesty and
discretion, gives me an order to make a pair of trousers; he pays me as
he agreed, without beating me down, and on the day he promised. We are
loyal to each other. I give him a pair of good trousers, honestly made,
and he pays me with good money. We are even. Have I the right afterward,
by imprudent words, or otherwise, to furnish clews against him? The case
is a delicate one.”

“Do you place the interest of the individual above that of society?”

“When it is a question of a professional secret, yes. Where should we be
if the lawyer, the notary, the doctor, the confessor, the tailor, could
accept compromises on this point of doctrine? It would be anarchy,
simply, and in the end it would be the interest of society that would
suffer.”

The agent, who had no time to lose, began to be impatient.

“I will tell you,” he said, “that the tailor, however important his
profession may be, is not placed exactly as the doctor or confessor.
Have you not a book in which you write your customers’ orders?”

“Certainly.”

“So that if you persevere in a theory, pushing it to an extreme, I need
only to go to the commissioner of your quarter, who, in virtue of the
power of the law conferred upon him, will seize your books.”

“That would be by violence, and my responsibility would

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/3990