ave brought stamped paper."

"Waiter, pens and ink!" cried Theodose.

"Ha! I like fellows of that kind!" exclaimed Dutocq.

"Sign: 'Theodose de la Peyrade,' and after your name put 'Barrister, rue
Saint-Dominique d'Enfer,' under the words 'Accepted for ten thousand.'
We'll date the notes and sue you,--all secretly, of course, but in
order to have a hold upon you; the owners of a privateer ought to have
security when the brig and the captain are at sea."

The day after this interview the bailiff of the justice-of-peace did
Cerizet the service of suing la Peyrade secretly. He went to see the
barrister that evening, and the whole affair was done without any
publicity. The Court of commerce has a hundred such cases in the course
of one term. The strict regulations of the council of barristers of
the bar of Paris are well known. This body, and also the council of
attorneys, exercise severe discipline over their members. A barrister
liable to go to Clichy would be disbarred. Consequently, Cerizet, under
Dutocq's advice, had taken against their puppet measures which were
certain to secure to each of them twenty-five thousand francs out of
Celeste's "dot." In signing the notes, Theodose saw but one thing,--his
means of living secured; but as time had gone on, and the horizon grew
clearer, and he mounted, step by step, to a better position on the
social ladder, he began to dream of getting rid of his associates. And
now, on obtaining twenty-five thousand francs from Thuillier, he hoped
to treat on the basis of fifty per cent for the return of his fatal
notes by Cerizet.

Unfortunately, this sort of infamous speculation is not an exceptional
fact; it takes place in Paris under various forms too little disguised
for the historian of manners and morals to pass them over unnoticed in
a complete and accurate picture of society in the nineteenth century.
Dutocq, an arrant scoundrel, still owed fifteen thousand francs on his
practice, and lived in hopes of something turning up to keep his head,
as the saying is, above water until the close of 1840. Up to the present
time none of the three confederates had flinched or groaned. Each felt
his strength and knew his danger. Equals they were in distrust, in
watchfulness; equals, too, in apparent confidence; and equally stolid in
silence and look when mutual suspicions rose to the surface of face or
speech. For the last two months the position of Theodose was acquiring
the strength of a