detached fort. But Cerizet and Dutocq held it
undermined by a mass of powder, with the match ever lighted; but the
wind might extinguish the match or the devil might flood the mine.

The moment when wild beasts seize their food is always the most
critical, and that moment had now arrived for these three hungry tigers.
Cerizet would sometimes say to Theodose, with that revolutionary glance
which twice in this century sovereigns have had to meet:--

"I have made you king, and here am I still nothing! for it is nothing
not to be all."

A reaction of envy was rushing its avalanche through Cerizet. Dutocq was
at the mercy of his copying clerk. Theodose would gladly have burned his
copartners could he have burned their papers in the same conflagration.
All three studied each other too carefully, in order to conceal their
own thoughts, not to be in turn divined. Theodose lived a life of three
hells as he thought of what lay below the cards, then of his own game,
and then of his future. His speech to Thuillier was a cry of despair;
he threw his lead into the waters of the old bourgeois and found there
nothing more than twenty-five thousand francs.

"And," he said to himself as he went to his own room, "possibly nothing
at all a month hence."

He new felt the deepest hatred to the Thuilliers. But Thuillier himself
he held by a harpoon stuck into the depths of the man's vanity; namely,
by the projected work, entitled "Taxation and the Sinking Fund," for
which he intended to rearrange the ideas of the Saint-Simonian "Globe,"
giving them a systematic form, and coloring them with his fervid
Southern diction. Thuillier's bureaucratic knowledge of the subject
would be of use to him here. Theodose therefore clung to this rope,
resolving to do battle, on so poor a base of operations, with the vanity
of a fool, which, according to individual character, is either granite
or sand. On reflection, Theodose was inclined to be content with the
prospect.

On the evening before the right of redemption expired, Claparon and
Cerizet proceeded to manipulate the notary in the following manner.
Cerizet, to whom Claparon had revealed the password and the notary's
retreat, went out to this hiding-place to say to the latter:--

"One of my friends, Claparon, whom you know, has asked me to come and
see you; he will expect you to-morrow, in the evening, you know where.
He has the paper you expect from him, which he will exchange with
you for the te