That same day Madame Caroline was to go to Mazaud's with reference to certain documents which she desired to add to the brief of her brother's case. She also wished to know what would be the broker's attitude in case the defence should summon him as a witness. Her appointment with him was for four o'clock, after the Bourse; and, on finding herself alone, she spent more than an hour and a half in classifying the information which she had already obtained. She was beginning to see more clearly through the heap of ruins. She had first asked herself where the money could have gone. In this catastrophe, in which two hundred millions had been swallowed up, if some pockets had been emptied, others must have been filled. Moreover, it seemed certain that the bears' rakes had not gathered in the whole sum; a frightful leakage had carried away a good third. On days of disaster at the Bourse, it is as though the soil absorbs some of the money—it wanders away, a little sticks to all fingers.

However, Gundermann alone must have pocketed fifty millions; and Daigremont, from twelve to fifteen. The Marquis de Bohain was also mentioned as a big winner. His classic stroke had once more succeeded: playing through Mazaud for a rise, he refused to pay his differences, though he was receiving nearly two millions from Jacoby, through whom he had played for a fall. This time, however, although well aware that the Marquis had transferred his property to his wife, like a vulgar sharper, Mazaud, quite bewildered by his heavy losses, talked of taking legal proceedings against him.

Almost all the directors of the Universal, moreover, had carved themselves large slices—some, like Huret and Kolb, realising at a high figure before the collapse; others, like the Marquis and Daigremont, adopting treacherous tactics and going over to the 'bears;' to say nothing of the fact that at one of the last meetings, when the Bank was already in difficulties, the board had credited each of its members with a bonus of a hundred and odd thousand francs. Finally, at the corbeille, Delarocque and Jacoby were reputed to have won large sums, while Nathansohn was said to have become one of the kings of the coulisse, thanks to a profit of three millions which he had realised by playing on his own account for a fall, while playing for Saccard for a rise. The extraordinary feature of his luck was that, having made very large purchases on behalf of the Universal which could no longer pay, he would certainly have failed, and have been 'posted,' if it had not been found necessary to pass the sponge over all the transactions of the coulisse, making it a present of the sums which it owed since it was undoubtedly insolvent. So little Nathansohn earned the reputation of being both very lucky and very adroit. And what a pretty and amusing adventure it was to be able to pocket one's winnings without being called upon to pay what one has lost!

However, all the figures remained vague; Madame Caroline could not form an exact estimate of the gains, for the operations of the Bourse are carried on with great mystery, and professional secrecy is strictly observed by the brokers. Even their memorandum-books would have told her nothing, no names being inscribed on them. Thus she in vain tried to ascertain what amount Sabatani had carried off with him on disappearing after the last settlement. That was another ruin, and a hard blow for Mazaud. It was the old story: the shady client, at first received with distrust, depositing a small security of two or three thousand francs, playing cautiously until he had established friendly relations with the broker, and the insignificance of his cover had been forgotten; then launching out, and taking to flight after perpetrating some brigand's trick. Mazaud talked of posting Sabatani, just as he had formerly posted Schlosser, a sharper of the same band, the eternal band which 'works' the market, in the same way as the robbers of olden time 'worked' a forest. And the Levantine, that half-Oriental, half-Italian, with velvet eyes, over whom all the women had grown crazy, had now gone to infest the Bourse of some foreign capital—Berlin, so it was said—pending the time when he should be forgotten at the Bourse of Paris, and could come back again, ready to repeat his stroke, amid general toleration.

Besides her list of the gains, Madame Caroline had drawn up one of the disasters. The catastrophe of the Universal had been one of those terrible shocks that make a whole city totter. Nothing had remained firmly standing. Other establishments had begun to give way; every day there were fresh collapses. One after another the banks went down, with the sudden crash of bits of walls left standing after a fire. In silent dismay folks listened to these repeated falls, and asked where the ruin would stop. But what struck Madame Caroline to the heart was not so much the downfall of the bankers, the companies, the men and things of finance, all destroyed and swept away in the tempest, as the ruin of the many poor people, shareholders, and even speculators, whom she had known and loved, and who were among the victims. After the defeat she counted her dead. And these were not only her poor Dejoie, the imbecile, wretched Maugendres, the sad Beauvilliers ladies, whose misfortune was so touching. Another tragedy had upset her, the failure of the silk manufacturer, Sédille, announced on the previous day. Having seen him at work as a director, the only one of the board, she said, to whom she would have entrusted ten sous, she declared him to be the most honest man in the world. What a frightful thing, then, was this passion for gambling! Here was a man who had spent thirty years in establishing, by dint of labour and honesty, one of the firmest houses in Paris, and who, in less than three years, had so cut and eaten into it that at one stroke, it had fallen into dust! How bitterly he must now regret the laborious days of former times, when he had still believed in the acquirement of fortune by prolonged effort, before a first chance gain had filled him with contempt for work, consumed him with the dream of gaining in an hour, at the Bourse, the million which requires the whole lifetime of an honest merchant! And the Bourse had swept everything away—the unfortunate man remained overwhelmed, fallen from his brilliant position, incapable of resuming business and disqualified from doing so, with a son, too, whom poverty might perhaps turn into a swindler—that Gustave, the soul of joy and festivity, who was living on a footing of from forty to fifty thousand francs worth of debts and was already compromised in an ugly story of some promissory notes signed in favour of a woman.

Then there was another poor devil who distressed Madame Caroline, the remisier Massias, and yet God knew that she was not usually tender towards those go-betweens of falsehood and theft! Only she had known Massias also, known him with his large, laughing eyes and the air of a good dog who has been whipped, at the time when he was scouring Paris seeking to obtain a few small orders. If, for a moment, in his turn, he had at last believed himself to be one of the masters of the market, having conquered luck in Saccard's wake, how frightful had been the fall which had awakened him from his dream! He had found himself owing seventy thousand francs, which he had paid, when, as so many others did, he might have pleaded that the matter was one of gambling, and that payment therefore could not be legally enforced. However, by borrowing from friends, and pledging his entire life, he had committed that sublime and useless stupidity of paying—useless, since no one felt the better of him for it; indeed, folks even shrugged their shoulders behind his back. His resentment, however, was only directed against the Bourse, for he had relapsed into his disgust for the dirty calling which he plied, and again shouted that one must be a Jew to succeed in it. Nevertheless, as he was in it, he resigned himself, still hoping that he might yet win the big prize provided he had a keen eye and good legs.

It was the thought, however, of the unknown dead, the victims without a name, without a history, that especially filled Madame Caroline's heart with pity. They were legion, strewn in the thickets, in the ditches full of weeds, and in this wise there were lost ones, wounded ones, with the death rattle in their throats, behind each tree-trunk. What frightful silent tragedies were here!—the whole throng of petty capitalists, petty shareholders, who had invested all their savings in the same securities, the retired door-porters, the pale old maids living with their cats, the provincial pensioners who had regulated their lives with maniacal rigidity, the country priests stripped bare by almsgiving—all those humble beings whose budgets consist of a few sous, so much for milk, so much for bread, such precise and scanty budgets that a deficiency of two sous brings on a cataclysm! And suddenly nothing was left, the threads of life were severed, swept away, and old trembling hands incapable of working groped in the darkness in bewilderment; scores and scores of humble, peaceful existences being at one blow thrown into frightful want. A hundred desperate letters had arrived from Vendôme, where Fayeux, the dividend collector, had aggravated the disaster by flight. Holding the money and shares of the customers for whom he operated at the Bourse, he had begun to gamble on his own account at a terrible rate; and, having lost, and being unwilling to pay, he had vanished with the few hundred thousand francs which were still in his hands. All round Vendôme, even in the remotest farms, he left poverty and tears. And thus the crash had reached even the humble homesteads. As after great epidemics, were not the really pitiable victims to be found among these people of the lower middle class whose little savings their sons alone could hope to reaccumulate after long years of hard toil?

At last Madame Caroline went out to go to Mazaud's; and as she walked towards the Rue de la Banque she thought of the repeated blows which had fallen upon the broker during the last fortnight. There was Fayeux, who had robbed him of three hundred thousand francs; Sabatani, who had left an unpaid account of nearly double that amount; the Marquis de Bohain and the Baroness Sandorff, both of whom refused to pay differences of more than a million; Sédille, whose bankruptcy had swept about the same amount away; to say nothing of the eight millions which the Universal owed him, those eight millions for which he had carried Saccard over, that frightful loss, the abyss into which from hour to hour, the anxious Bourse expected to see him tumble. Twice already had a catastrophe been reported. And, in this unrelenting fury of fate, a last misfortune had just befallen him, which was to prove the drop of water that would make the vase overflow. Two days previously his clerk Flory had been arrested, convicted of having embezzled a hundred and eighty thousand francs. The demands made upon the young man by Mademoiselle Chuchu, the little ex-figurante, the grasshopper from the Parisian pavements, had gradually increased: first, pleasure parties representing no great expense, then apartments in the Rue Condorcet, then jewels and laces; and that which had ruined the unfortunate, soft-hearted fellow had been his first profit of ten thousand francs, after Sadowa, that pleasure-money so quickly gained, so quickly spent, which had made him long for more and still more in his feverish passion for the woman who cost him so dear. But the extraordinary feature of the story was that Flory had robbed his employer simply to pay his gambling debt to another broker; a singular misconception of honesty due to the bewilderment that had come over him in his fear lest he should be immediately posted. And no doubt he had hoped he would be able to conceal the robbery, and replace the money by some miraculous operation. He had wept a great deal in prison, in a frightful awakening of shame and despair; and it was related that his mother, who had arrived that very morning from Saintes to see him, had been obliged to take to her bed at the house of the friends with whom she was stopping.

What a strange thing is luck! thought Madame Caroline, as she slowly crossed the Place de la Bourse. The extraordinary success of the Universal Bank, its ascent to triumph, conquest, and domination, in less than four years, and then its sudden collapse, a month sufficing to reduce the colossal edifice to dust—all this stupefied her. And was not this also Mazaud's story? Never had a man seen destiny smile upon him in such an engaging way. A broker at the age of thirty-two, already very rich through the death of his uncle, and the happy husband of a woman who adored him and who had presented him with two beautiful children, he was further a handsome man, and daily acquired increased importance at the corbeille by his connections, his activity, his really surprising scent, and even his shrill voice—that fife-like voice which had become as famous as Jacoby's thunder. But suddenly the ground began cracking around him, and he found himself on the edge of the abyss, into which a mere puff of air would now suffice to blow him. And yet he had not gambled on his own account, being still protected from that passion by his zeal for work, by his youthful anxiety. This blow had fallen on him through his inexperience and passion, through his trust in others. Moreover, people keenly sympathised with him; it was even pretended, with a deal of confidence, that he would come out of it all right.

When Madame Caroline had gone up to the office, she plainly detected an odour of ruin, a quiver of secret anguish in the gloomy rooms. On passing through the cashier's office, she noticed a score of persons, quite a little crowd, waiting, while the cashiers still met the engagements of the house, though with slackening hands like men who are emptying the last drawers. The 'account' office, the door of which was partially open, seemed to her asleep, for its seven employees were all reading their newspapers, having but few transactions to attend to, now that everything was at a standstill at the Bourse. The cash office alone showed some signs of life. And it was Berthier, the authorised clerk, who received her, greatly agitated himself, his face pale, through the misfortune which had fallen on his employer.

'I don't know whether Monsieur Mazaud will be able to receive you, madame,' said he. 'He is not well, for he caught cold through obstinately working without a fire all last night, and he has just gone down to his rooms on the first floor to get a little rest.'

Madame Caroline insisted, however. 'Oh, pray, monsieur, try to induce him to see me just for a moment,' she said. 'The salvation of my brother perhaps depends upon it. Monsieur Mazaud knows very well that my brother was never concerned in the transactions at the Bourse, and his testimony would be of great importance. Moreover, I want to get some figures from him; he alone can give me information about certain documents.'

At last, in a hesitating way, Berthier asked her to step into the broker's private office. 'Wait there a moment, madame,' he said. 'I will go and see.'

On entering this room Madame Caroline felt a keen sensation of cold. The fire must have gone out during the previous day, and no one had thought of lighting it again. But what struck her even more was the perfect order that prevailed here, as if the whole night and morning had been spent in emptying the drawers, destroying the useless papers, and classifying those which ought to be kept. Nothing was lying about, not a paper, not a letter. On the writing table there were only the inkstand, the pen-rack, and a large blotting-pad, on which there had merely remained a package of the fiches which Mazaud used—green fiches, the colour of hope. And with the room thus bare, an infinite sadness fell with the heavy silence.

In a few minutes Berthier reappeared. 'I have rung twice, madame,' he said, 'but there was no answer, and I do not dare to insist. Perhaps you will ring yourself on your way down. But I advise you to come again.'

Madame Caroline was obliged to retire; nevertheless, on reaching the first-floor landing, she again hesitated, and even extended her arm in order to ring the bell. But she had finally decided to go away, when loud cries and sobs, a muffled uproar, coming from the apartments, rooted her to the spot. And all at once the door opened, and a servant rushed out, with a scared look, and vanished down the stairs, stammering: 'My God! my God! Monsieur——'

Madame Caroline stood motionless before that open doorway, by which a wail of frightful grief now distinctly reached her. And she became very cold, divining the truth, a clear vision of what had happened arising before her. At first she wanted to flee; then she could not, overcome as she was by pity, attracted by the calamity she pictured, experiencing a need to see and contribute her own tears also. So she entered, found every door wide open, and went as far as the salon. Two servants, doubtless the cook and the chambermaid, stood at the doorway with terrified faces, stretching their necks into the room and stammering: 'Oh, monsieur! O God! O God!'

The dying light of that grey winter day entered faintly between the heavy silk curtains of the room. However, it was very warm there; the remnants of some huge logs lay in glowing embers in the fire-place, illumining the walls with a red reflection. On a table a bunch of roses, a royal bouquet for the season, which the broker had brought his wife on the previous day, was blooming in this greenhouse temperature, scenting the whole room. It was like the perfume of all the refined luxury which the apartment displayed, like the pleasant odour of luck, of wealth, of happiness in love, which for four years had flourished there. And, lighted by the ruddy glow from the fire, Mazaud lay on the edge of the sofa, his head pierced by a bullet, his clenched hand upon the stock of a revolver; while, standing before him, his young wife, who had hastened to the spot, was giving vent to that wail, that continuous wild cry which could be heard upon the stairs. At the moment of the report she had been holding in her arms her little boy, now four years and a half old; she had brought him with her, and his little hands were clasped around her neck in fright; while her little girl, already six, had followed her, hanging to her skirt and pressing against her. And hearing their mother cry the two children were crying also, crying desperately.

Madame Caroline at once tried to lead them away. 'Madame, I beg of you——Madame, do not stay here.'

She was trembling herself, however, and felt as if she would faint. She could see the blood still flowing from the hole in Mazaud's head, falling drop by drop upon the velvet of the sofa, whence it trickled on to the carpet. On the floor there was a large stain, which was growing yet larger. And it seemed to her as if this blood reached her, and bespattered both her feet and hands. 'Madame, I beg of you, follow me,' she said.

But, with her son hanging from her neck and her daughter clinging to her waist, the poor woman did not hear, did not stir, stiffened, planted there so firmly that no power in the world could have uprooted her. All three of them were fair, with complexions of milky freshness, the mother seemingly as delicate and as artless as the children. And in the stupor of their dead felicity, in this sudden annihilation of the happiness which was to have lasted for ever, they continued raising their loud cry, the shriek which expressed all the frightful suffering of the human race.

Then Madame Caroline fell down upon her knees, sobbing and stammering, 'Oh, madame, you rend my heart! For mercy's sake, madame, take yourself away from this spectacle; come with me into the next room; let me try to spare you a little of the evil that has been done you.'

And still the group remained there, motionless, wild and woeful, the mother and her two little ones, all three with long light loose hair. And still the frightful shrieking went on, that cry of the blood-tie which rises from the forest when the hunters have killed the sire.

Madame Caroline had risen, her head whirling. There were sounds of steps and voices; a doctor, no doubt, had come to verify the death. And she could remain no longer, but ran away, pursued by that abominable and endless wail, which she fancied she still heard, amid the rolling of the passing vehicles, when she had reached the street.

It was growing dark; the night was cold, and she walked slowly, fearing that people might arrest her, taking her for a murderess, with her haggard look. Everything rose up before her—the whole story of that monstrous crash, which had piled up so many ruins and crushed so many victims. What mysterious force was it then which, after building that golden tower so quickly, had just destroyed it? The same hands that had constructed it seemed to have become infuriated with it, seized with a fit of madness, determined not to leave one stone of it standing on another. Cries of sorrow arose on all sides; fortunes crumbled with a sound akin to that which is heard when the refuse of demolished houses is emptied into a public 'shoot.' The last domains of the Beauvilliers, the savings of Dejoie scraped together sou by sou, the profits which Sédille had realised from his silk-works, the bonds of the Maugendres, who had lately retired from business, were all flung pell-mell, with a crash, into the depths of the same cloaca, which nothing seemed to fill up. There were also Jantrou, drowned in alcohol; La Sandorff, drowned in mire; Massias, again forced to lead the wretched life of a dog, chained for ever to the Bourse by debt; Flory, a thief, in prison, expiating the weaknesses of his soft heart; and Sabatani and Fayeux, fugitives, galloping off in fear of the gendarmes. And there were the unknown victims, still more distressing and pitiable, the great flock of all the poor that the catastrophe had made—the poor, shivering in abandonment, crying with hunger. Then, too, there was death—the pistol-shots that re-echoed from the four corners of Paris; there was Mazaud's smashed head and Mazaud's blood, which, drop by drop, amid the luxury of a drawing-room and the perfume of roses, bespattered his wife and his little ones, shrieking with grief.

And then all that she had beheld, all that she had heard during the last few weeks poured forth from Madame Caroline's wounded heart—found vent in a cry of execration for Saccard. She could no longer keep silent, no longer put him aside as if he did not exist, so as to avoid judging and condemning him. He alone was guilty; it was shown by each of these accumulated disasters, the frightful pile of which terrified her. She cursed him; her wrath and her indignation, so long repressed, overflowed in a revengeful hatred, the hatred of evil itself. Did she no longer love her brother, then, that she had waited until now to hate the terrible man who was the sole cause of their misfortune? Her poor brother, that great innocent, that great toiler, so just and so honest, now soiled with the indelible stain of imprisonment, the victim whom she had forgotten, though he was dearer than all the others! Ah, that Saccard might find no pardon! that no one might dare to plead his cause any further, not even those who continued to believe in him, not even those who had only known his kindness!—that he might some day die alone, spurned and despised!

Madame Caroline raised her eyes. She had reached the Place de la Bourse, and saw the Temple of Money in front of her. The twilight was falling. Behind the building a ruddy cloud hung in the fog-laden wintry sky—a cloud like the smoke of a conflagration, charged with the flames and the dust of a stormed city. And against this cloud the Bourse stood out grey and gloomy in the melancholiness born of the catastrophe which, for a month past, had left it deserted, open to the four winds of heaven, like some market which famine has emptied. Once again had the inevitable, periodical epidemic come—the epidemic which sweeps through it every ten or fifteen years—the Black Fridays, as the speculators say, which strew the soil with ruins. Years are needed for confidence to be restored, for the great financial houses to be built up anew, and time goes slowly by until the passion for gambling, gradually reviving, flames up once more and repeats the adventure, when there comes another crisis, and the downfall of everything in a fresh disaster. This time, however, beyond the ruddy smoke on the horizon, in the hidden distant parts of the city, it seemed as though one could hear a vague sound of splitting and rending, betokening the end of a world—the world of the Second Empire.

CHAPTER XII

FROM HORROR TO HOPE

The investigation of the case progressed so slowly that seven months had gone by since the arrest of Saccard and Hamelin, and the case had not yet been entered on the roll. It was now the middle of September, and that Monday Madame Caroline, who went to see her brother twice a week, was to call at the Conciergerie at about three o'clock. She now never mentioned Saccard's name, and had a dozen times replied to his pressing requests to come and see him by formal refusal. For her, rigidly resolved on justice, he was no more. But she still hoped to save her brother, and became quite gay on visiting days, happy at being able to tell him of the last steps that she had taken, and to bring him a bouquet of his favourite flowers.

So that Monday morning she was preparing a large bunch of red carnations when old Sophie, the Princess d'Orviedo's servant, came down to tell her that her mistress wished to speak to her at once. Astonished and vaguely anxious, Madame Caroline hurried up the stairs. For several months she had not seen the Princess, for she had resigned her position as secretary of the Institute of Work immediately after the catastrophe of the Universal. She now only went to the Boulevard Bineau from time to time, and then merely to see Victor, who at present seemed to have been mastered by the rigid discipline, though he still retained an artful expression, with his left cheek larger than the right one, and his mouth twisted into a ferocious grimace. A presentiment at once came to Madame Caroline that she had been sent for by the Princess on his account.

The Princess d'Orviedo was at last ruined. Less than ten years had sufficed her to restore to the poor the three hundred millions of her husband's estate stolen from the pockets of over-credulous shareholders. Although she had required five years to spend the first hundred millions on extravagant works of charity, she had managed in four years and a half to sink the other two hundred in founding establishments of still greater luxury. To the Institute of Work, the St. Mary's Infant Asylum, the St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum, the Châtillon Asylum for the Aged, and the St. Marceau Hospital, she had added a model farm near Évreux, two convalescent homes for children on the banks of the Marne, another Asylum for the Aged at Nice, hospitals, model dwellings, libraries, and schools in the four corners of France, to say nothing of large donations to charities already in existence. She was still swayed, moreover, by the same desire of princely restitution; it was no question of flinging a crust to the wretched out of compassion or fear; she was bent upon giving all that is nice and beautiful, the enjoyments and superfluities of life, to humble folks possessed of nothing, to weak ones whom the strong had despoiled of their share of delight—in a word, it was as though the palaces of the wealthy had been flung wide open to the beggars of the high roads, so that they also might sleep in silk and feast off golden plate.

During ten years there had been no pause in the rain of millions which, amid endless complications with contractors and architects, had provided marble dining-halls, dormitories enlivened with bright paintings, façades as monumental as Louvres, gardens blooming with rare plants, indeed superb works of every kind; and the Princess now felt very happy, carried away by intense joy at finding her hands to be at last clean, unsoiled by the possession of even a centime. Indeed, she had actually managed to run into debt, and was being sued for a balance of accounts amounting to several hundred thousand francs, which her lawyers were unable to get together, so utterly had her vast fortune been frittered away, flung to the four winds of charity. And now a board nailed over the carriage entrance in the Rue Saint-Lazare announced the approaching sale of the mansion, the final sweep which would carry away the last vestiges of that accursed money, picked up in the mire and blood of financial brigandage.

Old Sophie was waiting for Madame Caroline on the landing in order to usher her in. Quite furious with the turn things had taken, the good creature scolded all day long. Ah! she had prophesied that her mistress would end by dying a beggar! Ought she not rather to have married again, so as to have children by another husband, since the one secret desire of her heart was to become a mother? Sophie herself had no reason for complaint or anxiety, as she had long since been provided with an annuity of two thousand francs, on which she was now going to live in her native village near Angoulême. Nevertheless, it made her angry to think that her mistress had not even kept back for herself the few sous that were needed every morning to pay for the bread and milk upon which she now subsisted. Incessant quarrels broke out between them. The Princess smiled, with her divine smile of hope, answering that she would need nothing but a winding-sheet when at the end of the month she should have entered the convent where her place had long been marked out for her, a convent of Carmelites walled off from the entire world. Rest, eternal rest! that was her goal.

Madame Caroline found the Princess as she had seen her for the last four years, clad in her everlasting black dress, her hair concealed by a lace fichu, still looking pretty at the age of thirty-nine, with her round face and pearly teeth, but having a yellow complexion, as after ten years of cloister life. And the small room, like the office of a provincial process-server, was littered with countless papers all jumbled together—plans, accounts, portfolios, all the waste paper connected with the squandering of three hundred millions of francs.

'Madame,' said the Princess, in her slow, gentle voice, which no emotion now could cause to tremble, 'I desired to acquaint you with some news that was brought to me this morning. It relates to Victor, the boy whom you placed at the Institute of Work.'

Madame Caroline's heart began to beat violently. Ah! the wretched child, whom his father, in spite of his formal promises, had not even gone to see, during the few months that he had known of his existence, prior to being imprisoned in the Conciergerie. What would become of the lad henceforth, she wondered. And she, who forbade herself all thought of Saccard, was continually compelled to think of him through the disturbing influence of her adoptive motherhood.

'A terrible thing happened yesterday,' continued the Princess—'a crime which nothing can repair.'

And thereupon, in her frigid way, she began to relate a frightful story. Three days previously, it seemed, Victor had obtained admission into the infirmary by complaining of insupportable headaches. The doctor of the Institute had suspected this to be the feigned illness of an idler, but in point of fact the lad was really a prey to frequent neuralgic attacks. Now on the afternoon in question it appeared that Alice de Beauvilliers had come to the Institute without her mother, in order to help the sister on duty with the quarterly inventory of the medicine closet. Victor happened to be alone in the adjoining infirmary, and the sister, having been obliged to absent herself for a short time, was amazed on her return to find Alice missing. She had begun to search for her, and at last, to her horror and amazement, had found her lying in the infirmary most severely injured—in fact, more dead than alive. Beside her, significantly enough, lay her empty purse. She had been attacked by Victor, and, brief as had been the sister's absence, the young miscreant had already contrived to flee. The astonishing part of the affair was that no sound of struggle, no call for help, had been heard by anyone. In less than ten minutes the crime had been planned and perpetrated, and its author had taken to flight. How could Victor have thus managed to escape, vanish, as it were, without leaving any trace behind him? A minute search had been made throughout the establishment, but it had become evident that he was no longer there. He must have gone off by way of the bathroom, which was entered from the infirmary corridor, and have jumped out of a window overlooking a series of roofs which gradually became lower and lower as they approached the Boulevard. However, this route seemed such a perilous one that many refused to believe that a human being could have traversed it; and thus the mode of Victor's escape remained somewhat doubtful. As for Alice, his unfortunate victim, she had been taken home to her mother, and was now confined to her bed, delirious, in a high fever.

Madame Caroline was so profoundly astounded by this awful story that it seemed to her as if all the blood in her heart were freezing. She thought of the young miscreant's parentage, and shuddered at the remembrance that Saccard was his father.

'I do not wish to reproach you, madame,' concluded the Princess, 'for it would be unjust to hold you in the least degree responsible. Only, you really had in this boy a very terrible protégé.' And, as if a connection of ideas had arisen in her mind, she added: 'One cannot live with impunity amid certain surroundings. I myself had the greatest qualms of conscience, and felt myself an accomplice when that Bank lately went to pieces, heaping up so many ruins and so many iniquities. Yes, I ought never to have allowed my house to become the cradle of such abomination. But the evil is done, the house will be purified, and I—oh! I am no more—God will forgive me.'

Her pale smile, of hope at last realised, had reappeared on her features, and with a gesture she foreshadowed her departure from the world, the end of the part which she had played as a good invisible fairy—her disappearance for evermore.

Madame Caroline had caught hold of her hands and was pressing and kissing them, so upset by remorse and pity that she stammered out disjointed words. 'You do wrong to excuse me,' she said; 'I am guilty—that poor girl, I must see her, I will go to see her at once.'

And thereupon she went off, leaving the Princess and her old servant to begin their packing for the great departure, which was to separate them after forty years of life together.

Two days previously, on the Saturday, the Countess de Beauvilliers had resigned herself to the course of abandoning her mansion to her creditors. For six months past she had not been able to pay the interest on the mortgage, and, what with costs of all sorts and the ever-present threat of foreclosure and enforced sale, the situation had become intolerable. Accordingly, her lawyer had advised her to let everything go, and to retire to some small lodging, where she might live on next to nothing, whilst he endeavoured to liquidate her affairs. She would not have yielded; even to the very annihilation of her race, the downfall of the ceilings upon her head she would have persisted, perhaps, in her efforts to keep up her station, and to make it appear that she was still possessed of means, had not a fresh misfortune all at once prostrated her. Her son Ferdinand, the last of the Beauvilliers—that useless young fellow, who, kept apart from all employment in France, had become a Pontifical Zouave in order to escape from his nullity and idleness—had died ingloriously at Rome, his blood so impoverished, his system so severely tried by the oppressive sun, that, already ill, suffering from a complaint of the chest, he had not been able to fight at Mentana.[28]

When the tidings of his death reached the Countess she felt a void within her, a collapse of all her ideas, all her plans—all the laboriously raised scaffolding which for so many years had so proudly upheld the honour of her name. Four and twenty hours sufficed; the walls cracked, and a spectacle of distressing misery stood revealed among the ruins. The old horse was sold; the cook alone remained, doing her shopping in a dirty apron, buying two sous' worth of butter and a quart of dry beans; whilst the Countess was perceived on the footway wearing a muddy skirt and boots which let in the water. It was the advent of pauperism in a single night; and such was the force of the disaster that it swept away even the pride of this woman, who believed so firmly in the good old times, and who had so long warred with the century in which she lived. She and her daughter had taken refuge in the Rue de la Tour-des-Dames, in the house of an old wardrobe dealer who had become a devotee and let out furnished rooms to priests. In this house the two women secured a large, bare room of dignified, mournful aspect. At the further end of it was an alcove, in which stood a couple of small beds; and when one had shut the folding doors with which this alcove was provided—doors covered with paper similar to that on the walls—the room became transformed into a parlour. This circumstance had somewhat consoled the poor creatures.

On the Saturday, however, the Countess had not been installed in the place for a couple of hours when an unexpected and extraordinary visit again plunged her into anguish. Alice fortunately had just gone out. The visitor was Busch, with his flat dirty face, greasy frock-coat, and white cravat twisted like a cord. Warned by his scent that the favourable moment had come, he had finally decided to push forward that old affair of the acknowledgment of ten thousand francs which the Count de Beauvilliers had signed in favour of Léonie Cron.

With a glance at the apartment, he took in the widow's situation. Had he waited too long? he wondered. However, like a man capable, on occasion, of urbanity and patience, he explained the case at length to the frightened Countess. This was really her husband's handwriting, was it not? It clearly told the story, upon which, by the way, he did not insist. Nor did he even conceal the fact that, fifteen years having elapsed, he did not believe that she was legally obliged to pay. However that might be, he was simply his client's representative, and knew that she was resolved to test the question in the law courts, and raise the most frightful scandal, unless the matter were compromised. When the Countess, ghastly pale, struck to the heart by the revival of the frightful past, expressed astonishment that they had waited so long before applying to her, he invented a story, saying that the acknowledgment had been lost, and found again at the bottom of a trunk; and, as she definitively refused to look into the matter, he went off, still evincing great politeness and saying that he would return with his client, though not on the morrow, as she would not then be at liberty, but either on the following Monday or Tuesday.

When the Monday came the Countess de Beauvilliers had quite forgotten that ill-dressed man and his cruel story, distracted as she was by the awful calamity which had befallen her daughter, who had been brought home to her delirious, and whom she had put to bed and nursed with tear-dimmed eyes. At last Alice had fallen asleep, and the mother had just sat down, exhausted, crushed by the unrelenting fury of fate, when Busch again presented himself, accompanied this time by Léonie.

'Madame, here is my client, and this matter must now be settled,' said the Jew.

At sight of Léonie, Madame de Beauvilliers shuddered. She looked at her, and saw her clad in crude colours, with coarse black hair falling over her eyebrows, her face broad and flabby, her whole person sordid and vile; and the Countess's heart was tortured, her woman's pride bled afresh after so many years of forgiveness and forgetfulness. O God of Heaven, to think it was for such creatures as this woman that her husband, the Count, had betrayed her!

The interview began. Neither Busch nor Léonie sought to mince matters, but spoke out plumply, crudely, with brazen faces. The woman was already telling her ignoble tale in a hoarse voice, spoilt by dram-drinking, whilst Busch unfolded and displayed the Count's promise to pay her ten thousand francs, when a moan came from the alcove, and Alice began stirring under her coverlet. Only one of the folding-doors was closed, and the Countess, with a gesture of anguish, hastened to shut the other one. Ah, that only her daughter might get to sleep again, see nothing, hear nothing, of all this abomination!

Léonie, however, was fairly launched, and went on with her narrative, speaking at last so impudently, so coarsely, that Madame de Beauvilliers, in furious exasperation, raised her hand to strike her.

'Be quiet! be quiet!' cried the Countess; whilst Léonie, in a fright, instinctively raised her elbow to shield her face, like one accustomed to be beaten.

And then a fearful silence fell, soon broken, however, by a fresh plaint from the alcove, a low sound like that of stifled sobbing. The Countess heard it. 'Well, what do you want?' she asked, trembling and lowering her voice.

Busch thereupon intervened: 'Why, madame, this girl wants to be paid, and she is right. Your husband signed that paper, and it ought to be honoured.'

'Never will I pay such a debt.'

'Then we shall take a cab on leaving here and go to the Palais de Justice, where I shall lodge the complaint which I have already drafted, and which you can see here. In it are related all the facts which Mademoiselle has just told you.'

'But this is abominable blackmailing; you will not do such a thing.'

'I beg your pardon, madame, I shall do it at once. Business is business.'

Intense weariness, utter discouragement, took possession of the Countess. The last flash of pride, which had kept her up, had just given way, and all her violence, all her strength, fell with it. She clasped her hands and stammered: 'But you see to what we are reduced. Look at this room. We have nothing left; to-morrow, perhaps, we shall even lack bread to eat. Where do you expect me to get the money? Ten thousand francs, my God!'

Busch smiled, like a man accustomed to fish in such ruins. 'Oh, ladies like you always have resources! You will find the needful if you look carefully.'

For a moment he had been watching an old jewel-casket, which the Countess had left on the mantel-shelf that morning after emptying a trunk, and he scented the precious stones within it with unfailing instinct. His eyes shone indeed with such a flame that Madame de Beauvilliers followed the direction of his glance, and understood. 'No, no!' she cried: 'the jewels, never!'

She seized hold of the casket as if to defend it. Those last jewels which had so long been in the family, those few jewels which she had kept through periods of the greatest embarrassment as her daughter's only dowry, and which now were her final resource! Part with them? 'Never! I would rather give my flesh,' she cried.

But just then there was a diversion; Madame Caroline knocked and entered. She arrived in a distracted state, and stopped short in astonishment at the scene upon which she had fallen. In a few words she asked the Countess not to disturb herself, and would have gone away but for a supplicating gesture from the poor woman, which she thought she could understand. So she remained there, motionless, apart from the others, at the further end of the room.

Busch had just put on his hat again, while Léonie, more and more ill at ease, went towards the door.

'Then, madame, there is nothing left for us but to retire,' said the Jew.

Yet he did not retire, but on the contrary repeated the whole story, in terms more shameful still, as if to further humiliate the Countess in presence of the new-comer—this lady whom he pretended not to recognise, according to his custom when he was engaged in business.

'Good-bye, madame,' he said at last, 'we are going to the office of the Public Prosecutor at once. The whole story will be in the newspapers within three days from now. And for that you will only have to thank yourself.'

In the newspapers! This horrible scandal upon the very ruins of her house! It was not enough, then, that the ancient fortune should have crumbled to dust; everything must roll in the mud as well. Ah! might not the honour of the name at least be saved? And with a mechanical movement she opened the casket. The ear-rings, the bracelet, three rings appeared, brilliants and rubies, in old-fashioned settings.

Busch had eagerly drawn near. His eyes softened with a caressing gentleness. 'Oh!' said he, 'these are not worth ten thousand francs. Let me look at them.'

His sensual passion for precious stones had burst forth, and he was already taking the jewels up one by one, turning them over, holding them in the air, with his fat, trembling, loving fingers. The purity of the rubies especially seemed to throw him into an ecstasy; and those old brilliants, although their cutting was sometimes unskilful, of what a marvellous water they were!

'Six thousand francs!' said he, in the hard voice of an auctioneer, hiding his emotion under this estimate. 'I only count the stones; the settings are merely fit for the melting pot. Well, we will be satisfied with six thousand francs.'

But it was too severe a sacrifice for the Countess. Her violence revived; she took the jewels away from him and held them tight in her convulsed hands. No, no! it was too much to require that she should also throw into the gulf those few stones, which her mother had worn, and which her daughter was to have worn on her wedding day. Burning tears started from her eyes, and streamed down her cheeks, in such tragic grief that Léonie, her heart touched, distracted with pity, began tugging at Busch's coat to force him to go off. She herself wished to leave, feeling that it was not right to give so much pain to that poor old lady, who seemed so good. Busch, however, watched the scene very coldly, now confident that he would carry the jewels off with him, knowing, as he did, by long experience that fits of crying, with women, betoken the collapse of the will; and so he waited.

Perhaps the frightful scene would have been prolonged if at that moment a distant, stifled voice had not burst into sobs. It was Alice, calling from the alcove: 'Oh! mamma, they are killing me! Give them everything, let them take everything away! Oh! mamma, let them go away! They are killing me, they are killing me!'

Then the Countess made a gesture of desperate abandonment, the gesture of one who would have given her very life. Her daughter had heard; her daughter was dying of shame. That sufficed, and she flung the jewels at Busch, and hardly gave him time to lay the Count's acknowledgment upon the table in exchange, but pushed him out of the room, after Léonie, who had already disappeared. Then the unhappy woman again opened the alcove, and let her head fall upon Alice's pillow; and there they remained, both exhausted, overwhelmed, mingling their tears.

Swayed by a feeling of revolt, Madame Caroline had been for a moment on the point of intervening. Could she allow that wretch to strip those two poor women in that fashion? But she had just heard the shameful story, and what could be done to avoid the scandal? For she knew him to be a man to carry out his threats. She herself felt ashamed in his presence, in the complicity of the secrets which they shared. Ah! what suffering, what filth! A feeling of embarrassment came over her; why had she hastened to this room, since she could find neither words to say nor help to offer? All the phrases that came to her lips, questions, mere allusions with regard to the terrible event of the day before, seemed to her out of place, cruel in presence of the suffering victim. And what help could she have offered which would not have seemed like derisive charity, she who was also ruined, already embarrassed as to how she might contrive to live pending the issue of the trial? At last she advanced, with eyes full of tears and arms open, overcome by infinite compassion, wild emotion which made her whole being tremble.

Those two miserable, fallen, hopeless creatures in that vulgar lodging-house alcove were all that remained of the ancient race of the Beauvilliers, formerly so powerful, exercising sovereign sway. That race had owned estates as large as a kingdom; twenty leagues along the Loire had belonged to it—castles, meadows, arable land, forests. But this immense landed fortune had gradually dwindled with the progress of the centuries, and the Countess had just engulfed the last shreds of it in one of those tempests of modern speculation of which she had no comprehension: at first the twenty thousand francs which she had saved, accumulated for her daughter sou by sou, then the sixty thousand francs borrowed on Les Aublets, and then the farm itself. The mansion in the Rue Saint-Lazare would not pay her creditors. Her son had died far from her and ingloriously. Her daughter had been brought home to her in a pitiable condition, perhaps also destined soon to die. And the Countess, formerly so noble, tall, and slender, perfectly white, with her grand past-century air; was now nothing but a poor old woman, destroyed, shattered by all this devastation; while Alice, without beauty or youth, displaying her elongated scarecrow neck, had a gleam of madness in her eyes—madness mingled with mortal grief as she mourned over the irreparable. And they both sobbed, sobbed on, without a pause.

Then Madame Caroline did not say a word, but simply took hold of them and pressed them tightly to her heart. It was the only thing that she could do; she wept with them. And the two unfortunates understood her; their tears began to course more gently. Though no consolation was possible, would it not still be necessary to live, to live on in spite of everything?

When Madame Caroline was again in the street she caught sight of Busch conferring with La Méchain. He hailed a cab, pushed Léonie into it, and then disappeared. But, as Madame Caroline was hurrying away, La Méchain marched straight up to her. She had no doubt been waiting for her, for she immediately began to talk of Victor, like one who already knew what had happened on the previous day at the Institute of Work. Since Saccard's refusal to pay the four thousand francs she had been living in a perfect rage, ever exerting her ingenuity in search of some means by which she might further exploit the affair; and thus she had just learnt the story at the Boulevard Bineau, where she frequently went, in the hope of hearing something to her advantage. Her plan must have been settled upon, for she declared to Madame Caroline that she should immediately begin searching for Victor. The poor child! she said, it was too terrible to abandon him in this way to his evil instincts; he must be found again, if they did not wish to see him some fine morning in the dock. And as she spoke, her little eyes, peeping out of her fat face, searchingly scrutinised the good lady, whom she was happy to find in such distress, for she reflected that, after she had found the boy, she would be able to get some more five-franc pieces out of her.

'So it is agreed, madame,' she said. 'I am going to look after the matter. In case you should desire any news, don't take the trouble to go all the way to the Rue Marcadet, but call at Monsieur Busch's office, in the Rue Feydeau, where you are certain to find me every day at about four o'clock.'

Madame Caroline returned to the Rue Saint-Lazare, tormented by a new anxiety. There was that young monster free, roaming the world; and who could tell what evil hereditary instincts he might not seek to satisfy, like some devouring wolf? She made a hasty meal, and then took a cab, consumed by her desire to obtain some information at once, and having time, she found, to go to the Boulevard Bineau before her visit to the Conciergerie. On the way, amidst the agitation of her fever, an idea seized hold of her and mastered her: to call on Maxime first of all, take him to the Institute, and force him to concern himself about Victor, who was his brother after all. He, Maxime, alone remained rich; he alone could intervene and deal with the matter to some purpose.

But Madame Caroline had no sooner entered the hall of the luxurious little residence in the Avenue de l'Impératrice than she felt a chill. Upholsterers were removing the hangings and carpets, servants were covering the chairs and chandeliers; while from all the pretty trifles which were being moved about came a dying perfume, like that of a bouquet thrown away on the morrow of a ball. And in the bedroom she found Maxime between two huge trunks in which his valet was packing a marvellous outfit, as rich and delicate as a bride's.

As soon as he perceived her the young man spoke, in a dry, frigid voice. 'Ah! is it you? Your visit is well timed. It will save me from writing to you. I have had enough of it all, and I am going away.'

'What! You are going away?'

'Yes, I start this evening; I am going to spend the winter at Naples.'

And when, with a wave of the hand, he had sent his valet away, he continued: 'You are mistaken if you imagine that I have been at all amused at having my father in the Conciergerie during the last six months! I am certainly not going to stay here to see him in the dock, though I utterly detest travelling. But then they have fine weather in the South; I am taking what I am most likely to require, and perhaps after all I shan't feel so much bored.'

She looked at him as he stood there so correctly groomed; she looked at the overflowing trunks, in which lay nothing belonging to wife or mistress, nothing but what served for the worship of himself; and all the same she made the venture.

'I had come to ask a service of you,' she said; and forthwith she told the story—Victor a bandit, Victor a fugitive, capable of every crime. 'We cannot abandon him,' she added. 'Come with me; let us unite our efforts.'

He did not allow her to finish, however, but, turning livid, trembling from fear, as if he had felt some dirty murderous hand upon his shoulder, exclaimed: 'Well, that was the only thing wanting! A thief for a father, an assassin for a brother! I have remained here too long; I wanted to start last week. Why, it is abominable, abominable, to put a man like me in such a position!'

Then, as she insisted, he became insolent. 'Let me alone, I tell you. Since this life of worry amuses you, stay in it. I warned you, remember; it serves you right if you weep to-day. But, for my own part, rather than put myself out for them in the slightest degree, I would sweep the whole villainous crew into the gutter.'

She had risen to her feet. 'Good-bye, then.'

'Good-bye.'

And, as she withdrew, she saw him summoning his valet again, and superintending the careful packing of a nécessaire de toilette, the silver-gilt pieces of which were chased in the most gallant fashion, especially the basin, on which was engraved a round of Cupids. While she pictured him going away to live in forgetfulness and idleness, under the bright sun of Naples, she suddenly had a vision of the other one, hungry, prowling, on a dark, muggy night, with a knife in his hands, in some lonely alley of La Villette or Charonne. Was not this the answer to the question whether money is not education, health, and intelligence? Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

On reaching the Institute of Work Madame Caroline experienced a keen feeling of revolt at sight of all the vast luxury of the establishment. Of what use were those two majestic wings, one for the boys and the other for the girls, connected by the monumental pavilion reserved for the offices? Of what use were those yards as large as parks, those faïence walls in the kitchens, those marbles in the dining-halls, those staircases and corridors broad enough for a palace? Of what use was all that grandiose charity if they could not, in such spacious and salubrious surroundings, straighten an ill-bred creature, turn a perverted child into a well-behaved man, with the upright reason of health?

She went straight to the director, and pressed him with questions, wishing to know the slightest details. But the drama was veiled in obscurity; he could only repeat what she had already learnt from the Princess. Since the previous day the investigations had continued, both in the Institute and in the neighbourhood, but without yielding the slightest result. Victor was already far away, galloping through the city, in the depths of the frightful unknown. He could not have any money left, for Alice's purse, which he had emptied, had only contained three francs and four sous. The director, moreover, had avoided informing the police, in order to spare the poor Beauvilliers ladies from public scandal; and Madame Caroline thanked him, promising that she herself would take no steps at the Prefecture, in spite of her ardent desire to know what had become of the lad. Then, in despair at going away as ignorant as she had come, it occurred to her to repair to the infirmary to question the sisters. But even there she could get no precise information, though she enjoyed a few minutes of profound appeasement in the quiet little room which separated the girls' dormitory from that of the boys A joyous tumult was now rising from the yards; it was playtime, and she felt that she had not done justice to the happy cures effected by open air, comfort, and work. Lads were growing up here who would certainly prove strong and healthy men. Four or five men of average honesty to one bandit, surely that would still be a fine result, in the chances that aggravate or diminish hereditary vices!

Left alone for a moment by the sister on duty, Madame Caroline had just approached a window to watch the children playing below, when the crystalline voices of some little girls in the adjoining infirmary attracted her. The door was half open; she could witness the scene without being noticed. This infirmary was a very cheerful room, with its white walls and its four beds draped with white curtains. A broad sheet of sunlight was gilding all the whiteness, a blooming of lilies, as it were, in the warm atmosphere. In the first bed on the left she clearly recognised Madeleine, the little convalescent whom she had seen there, eating bread and jam, on the day when she had brought Victor to the Institute. The child was always falling ill, consumed by the alcoholism of her race, so poor in blood, too, that, with her large womanly eyes, she was as slender and pale as the saints that one sees in stained-glass windows. She was now thirteen years old, and quite alone in the world, her mother having died from violence during a drunken orgy. And Madeleine it was who, kneeling in the middle of her bed in her long white nightdress, with her fair hair streaming over her shoulders, was teaching a prayer to three little girls occupying the three other beds.

'Join your hands like this, open your hearts very wide.'

The three little girls were also kneeling amid their bed-clothes. Two of them were between eight and ten years old, the third was not yet five. In their long white nightdresses, with their frail hands clasped and their serious and ecstatic faces, one would have taken them for little angels.

'And you must repeat after me what I am going to say. Listen! "O God, please reward Monsieur Saccard for all his kindness; let him live long and be happy!"'

Then, in their cherubs' voices, the adorably faulty lisping of childhood, the four girls, in an impulse of faith in which all their pure little beings were offered up, repeated simultaneously:

'O God, please reward Monsieur Saccard for all his kindness; let him live long and be happy!'

Madame Caroline experienced a sudden impulse to enter the room and hush those children, and forbid what she regarded as a blasphemous and cruel game. No, no! Saccard had no right to be loved; it was pollution to allow infancy to pray for his happiness. Then a great shudder stopped her; tears rose to her eyes. Why should she force those innocent beings, who as yet knew nothing of life, to espouse her quarrel, the wrath of her experience? Had not Saccard been good to them, he who was to some extent the creator of this establishment, and who sent them playthings every month? She was profoundly agitated, again finding in all this a proof that there is no man utterly blameworthy, no man who, amid all the evil which he may have done, has not also done much good. And while the little girls again took up their prayer, she went off, carrying away with her the sound of those angelic voices calling down the blessings of heaven upon the conscienceless man, the artisan of catastrophes, whose mad hands had just ruined a world.

As she at last alighted from her cab on the Boulevard du Palais, outside the Conciergerie, she discovered that in her emotion she had forgotten to bring the carnations which she had prepared that morning for her brother. There was a flower-girl near by, selling little bouquets of roses at two sous apiece; and she purchased one, and made Hamelin, who was very fond of flowers, smile when she told him of her thoughtlessness. That afternoon, however, she found him unusually sad. At first, during the earlier weeks of his imprisonment, he had been unable to believe that the charges against him were serious. His defence seemed to him a simple matter: he had been elected chairman against his will; he had had nothing to do with the financial operations, having been almost always absent from Paris and unable to exercise any control. But his conversations with his lawyer and the steps that Madame Caroline had taken, with no other result than weariness and vexation of spirit, had finally made him realise the frightful responsibilities that rested on him. He would be held partially responsible for the slightest illegalities that had been perpetrated; it would never be admitted that he had been ignorant of a single one of them; he would be regarded as Saccard's accomplice. And it was then that in his somewhat simple faith as a fervent Catholic he found a resignation and tranquillity of soul that astonished his sister. When she arrived from the outer world, from her anxious errands, from the midst of the harsh, turbid humanity which enjoyed freedom, it astonished her to find him peaceful and smiling in his bare cell, to the walls of which, like the pious child he was, he had nailed around a small black wooden crucifix four crudely coloured religious prints. However, as soon as one puts oneself in the hand of God there is no more rebellion; all undeserved suffering becomes a guarantee of salvation. Thus Hamelin's only sadness arose from the disastrous stoppage of his enterprises. Who would take up his work? Who would continue the resurrection of the East, so felicitously commenced by the United Steam Navigation Company and the Carmel Silver Mining Company? Who would construct the network of railways, from Broussa to Beyrout and Damascus, from Smyrna to Trebizond, which was to set young blood flowing through the veins of the Old World? For, despite everything, he still believed in it all; he said that the work begun could not die; he only felt grieved at no longer being the hand chosen by Heaven for its execution. And especially did his voice break when he sought to know in punishment of what fault God had not permitted him to found that great Catholic bank, which was destined to transform modern society, that treasury of the Holy Sepulchre which would restore a kingdom to the Pope and finally make a single nation of all the peoples, by taking from the Jews the sovereign power of money. And this also he predicted, this inevitable, invincible bank; he prophesied the coming of the just man with pure hands who would some day found it. And if on that Monday afternoon he seemed anxious, it must have simply been because, amidst all the serenity of a man accused and about to be convicted, he had reflected that on emerging from prison his hands would never be sufficiently clean to resume the great work.

He listened absent-mindedly while his sister explained to him that newspaper opinion seemed to be growing a little more favourable to him. And then, without any transition, looking at her with his dreamy eyes, he inquired, 'Why do you refuse to see him?'

She trembled; she clearly understood that he referred to Saccard. Shaking her head she answered No, and No again. Then, with considerable embarrassment, in a very low voice, he said:

'After what he has been to you, you cannot refuse; go and see him!'

O God! he knew. An ardent flush suffused her countenance; she threw herself into his arms to hide her face, and she stammered, and asked who could have told him, how he could know that thing which she had thought known to none, especially himself.

'My poor Caroline,' he answered, 'I learnt it long ago by anonymous letters from wicked people who were jealous of us. I have never spoken to you about it; you are free, we no longer think alike. I know that you are the best woman on earth. Go and see him.'

And then gaily, his smile reappearing on his face, he took down the little bouquet of roses, which he had already slipped behind the crucifix, and placed it in her hand, adding, 'Take him this, and tell him that I am no longer angry with him.'

Upset by her brother's compassionate tenderness, experiencing at the same time frightful shame and delightful relief, Madame Caroline did not resist any further. Moreover, ever since morning, the necessity of seeing Saccard had been growing upon her. Could she abstain from warning him of Victor's flight, of that atrocious affair which still made her tremble? At the outset of his imprisonment he had set down her name among those of the persons whom he desired to see; and she had only to say who she was and a warder at once led her to the prisoner's cell.

When she entered, Saccard, with his back to the door, was sitting at a little table, covering a sheet of paper with figures. He rose quickly, with a shout of joy. 'You! Oh, how kind you are, and how happy I am!'

He had taken one of her hands in both his own. She was smiling with an embarrassed air, deeply moved, unable to find the right word to say. Then, with her free hand, she laid her little bouquet among the sheets of paper, covered with figures, that littered the table.

'You are an angel!' he murmured, delighted, and kissing her fingers.

At last she spoke. 'It is true, it was all over, I had condemned you in my heart. But my brother wished me to come.'

'No, no, do not say that! Say that you are too intelligent, that you are too good, and that you have understood, and forgive me.'

With a gesture she interrupted him. 'Do not ask so much, I implore you. I do not know myself. Is it not enough that I have come? And, besides, I have something very sad to tell you.'

Then, in an undertone, she swiftly told him of the awakening of Victor's savage instincts, his attack upon Mademoiselle de Beauvilliers, his extraordinary, inexplicable flight, the fruitlessness thus far of all search, the little hope there was of ever finding him. He listened to her, astonished, without asking a question or making a gesture; and, when she had finished, two big tears dilated his eyes and rolled down his cheeks, while he stammered: 'The wretched fellow! the wretched fellow!'

She had never seen him weep before. She was deeply agitated and astonished, so singular did these tears of Saccard seem to her, gray and heavy, coming from afar, from a heart hardened and debased by years of brigandage. Immediately afterwards, moreover, he burst into noisy despair. 'But it is frightful; I have never embraced this boy. For you know that I had not seen him. Mon Dieu! yes, I had sworn to go and see him, and I did not have the time, not a free hour, with all those cursed business matters which were devouring me. Ah! that is always the way; when you don't do a thing immediately, you are certain never to do it at all. And so now you are sure that I cannot see him? They might bring him to me here.'

She shook her head. 'Who knows,' she answered, 'in what unknown depths of this terrible Paris he may now be?'

For another moment he continued striding up and down, dropping scraps of phrases as he walked. 'The child is found for me, and here I lose him. I shall never see him now. The fact is, I have no luck; no! no luck at all. Oh! mon Dieu! it is just the same as in the matter of the Universal.'

He had just sat down again at the table, and Madame Caroline took a chair opposite him. With his hands wandering among his papers, the whole voluminous brief which he had been preparing for months past, he at once went into the history of his case and explained his methods of defence, as if he felt the need of showing her that he was innocent. The prosecution relied, first, on the repeated increases of capital devised both to bring about a feverish rise in the quotations, and to make people believe that all the shares of the Bank had been taken up; secondly, on the simulation of subscriptions and payments, by means of the accounts opened with Sabatani and other men of straw; thirdly, on the distribution of fictitious dividends under the form of a release of the old shares; and, finally, on the purchase by the Bank of its own stock, all that wild speculation which had brought about the extraordinary, fictitious rise, by which the Bank's coffers had been drained, and the Bank itself killed. These charges he answered with copious and passionate explanations: he had done what every bank manager does, only he had done it on a large scale, with the vigour of a strong man. There was not one of the heads of the firmest houses in Paris but ought to share his cell, if logic were to count for anything. They made him the scapegoat, however, answerable for the illegalities of all. What a strange way of apportioning the responsibilities! Why did they not prosecute the directors also—the Daigremonts, the Hurets, the Bohains—who, in addition to their fifty thousand francs of attendance fees, had received ten per cent. of the profits, and had dabbled in all the jobs? Why also was complete impunity granted to the auditors, Lavignière among others, who were allowed to plead their incapacity and their good faith? This trial was evidently going to be a monstrous piece of iniquity, for they had had to set aside Busch's charge of swindling, as alleging unsubstantiated facts; and the report made by the expert, after a first examination of the Bank's books, had just been found to be full of errors. Then, why the bankruptcy, officially declared on the strength of that report and Busch's charge, when not a sou of the deposits had been embezzled, and all the customers would re-enter into possession of their funds? Had they simply wished to ruin the shareholders? In that case they had succeeded; the disaster was becoming greater and greater, immeasurable. And he did not charge himself with this; he charged the magistracy, the government, all those who had conspired to suppress him and kill the Universal.

'Ah, the rascals! if they had left me free, you would have seen—you would have seen!'

Madame Caroline looked at him, impressed by his lack of conscience, which was becoming really grand. She remembered his theories of former days, the necessity of speculation in great enterprises, in which all just reward is impossible; gambling regarded as human excess, the necessary manure, the dung-heap from which progress grows. Was it not he who, with his unscrupulous hands, had madly heated the enormous machine, until it had burst to atoms and wounded all those whom it carried along with it? Was it not he who had desired that senseless, idiotic, exaggerated quotation of three thousand francs per share?

He had risen from his seat, however, and was walking up and down the little room with the spasmodic step of a caged conqueror.

'Ah! the rascals, they well knew what they were doing when they chained me up here,' he said. 'I was on the point of triumphing and crushing them all.'

She gave a start of surprise and protest. 'What! triumph? Why, you hadn't a sou left; you were conquered.'

'Evidently,' he rejoined, bitterly, 'I was conquered and so I am a blackguard. Honesty, glory, are simply other names for success. A man must not let himself be beaten, for otherwise he will find himself a fool and a fraud on the morrow. Oh, I can guess very well what they are saying; you need not repeat their words to me! They talk of me as a robber; they accuse me of having put all those millions in my pocket; they would strangle me, if they held me in their clutches; and, what is worse, they shrug their shoulders with pity, look upon me as a mere madman, a man of no intelligence. That is it, eh? But, if I had succeeded! Yes, if I had struck down Gundermann, conquered the market, if I were at this hour the undisputed king of gold, what a triumph would there then have been! I should now be a hero, I should have Paris at my feet.'