ly concealed from me.

Next: who is spending these fabulous sums on me? Is it a father tenderly
attached to a child of love? No, it is a father who shows me the
utmost coldness, who goes to sleep when deeds which concern our mutual
existence are being drawn, and for whom I, on my side, am conscious of
no feeling; in fact, not to mince my words, I should think him a great
booby of an _emigre_ if it were not for the filial respect and duty I
force myself to feel for him.

_But_--suppose this man were not my father, not even the Marquis de
Sallenauve, as he asserts himself to be; suppose, like that unfortunate
Lucien de Rubempre, whose history has made so much noise, I were caught
in the toils of a serpent like that false abbe Don Carlos Herrera, and
had made myself liable to the same awful awakening. You may say to me
that you see no such likelihood; that Carlos Herrera had an object in
fascinating Lucien and making him his double; but that I, an older man
with solid principles and no love of luxury, who have lived a life of
thought and toil, should fear such influence, is nonsense.

So be it. But why should the man who recognizes me as his son conceal
the very country in which he lives, and the name by which he is known
in that equally nameless Northern land which it is intimated that he
governs? Why make such sacrifices for my benefit and show so little
confidence? And see the mystery with which Jacques Bricheteau has
surrounded my life! Do you think that that long-winded explanation of
his explained it?

All this, my dear friend, rolling in my head and clashing with that
half-million already paid to me, has given substance to a strange idea,
at which you may perhaps laugh, but which, nevertheless, is not without
precedent in criminal annals.

I told you just now that this thought invaded me as it were suddenly;
it came like an instinct upon me. Assuredly, if I had had the faintest
inkling of it last evening, I would have cut off my right hand sooner
than sign that deed by which I have henceforth bound my fate to that
of an unknown man whose past and future may be as gloomy as a canto of
Dante's Hell, and who may drag me down with him into utter darkness.

In short, this idea--round which I am making you circle because I cannot
bring myself to let you enter it--here it is, in all its crudity; I
am afraid of being, without my knowledge, the agent, the tool of those
associations of false coiners who are known in cri