aid for the best of doctors.
Well, so it is with a man who cherishes a woman in his heart when the
woman is forced to disdain him for his ugliness or his deformity; he
ends by knowing so much of love that he becomes seductive, just as the
sick man recovers his health; stupidity alone is incurable. I have
had neither father nor mother since I was six years old; I am now
twenty-five. Public charity has been my mother, the procureur du roi my
father. Oh! don't be troubled," he added, seeing Ernest's gesture; "I am
much more lively than my situation. Well, for the last six years, ever
since a woman's eye first told me I had no right to love, I do love, and
I study women. I began with the ugly ones, for it is best to take the
bull by the horns. So I took my master's wife, who has certainly been
an angel to me, for my first study. Perhaps I did wrong; but I couldn't
help it. I passed her through my alembic and what did I find? this
thought, crouching at the bottom of her heart, 'I am not so ugly as they
think me'; and if a man were to work upon that thought he could bring
her to the edge of the abyss, pious as she is."

"And have you studied Modeste?"

"I thought I told you," replied Butscha, "that my life belongs to her,
just as France belongs to the king. Do you now understand what you
called my spying in Paris? No one but me really knows what nobility,
what pride, what devotion, what mysterious grace, what unwearying
kindness, what true religion, gaiety, wit, delicacy, knowledge, and
courtesy there are in the soul and in the heart of that adorable
creature!"

Butscha drew out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, and La Briere
pressed his hand for a long time.

"I live in the sunbeam of her existence; it comes from her, it is
absorbed in me; that is how we are united,--as nature is to God, by the
Light and by the Word. Adieu, monsieur; never in my life have I talked
in this way; but seeing you beneath her windows, I felt in my heart that
you loved her as I love her."

Without waiting for an answer Butscha quitted the poor lover, into whose
heart his words had put an inexpressible balm. Ernest resolved to make
a friend of him, not suspecting that the chief object of the clerk's
loquacity was to gain communication with some one connected with
Canalis. Ernest was rocked to sleep that night by the ebb and flow
of thoughts and resolutions and plans for his future conduct, whereas
Canalis slept the sleep of the conqueror, w