ly:

"MY LOVE,--As I have told you, my wife has not for five-and-twenty
years interfered with my pleasures. For you I would give up a
hundred Adelines.--I will be in the Crevel sanctum at nine this
evening awaiting my divinity. Oh that your clerk might soon die!
We should part no more. And this is the dearest wish of

"YOUR HECTOR."

That evening the Baron told his wife that he had business with the
Minister at Saint-Cloud, that he would come home at about four or five
in the morning; and he went to the Rue du Dauphin. It was towards the
end of the month of June.

Few men have in the course of their life known really the dreadful
sensation of going to their death; those who have returned from the
foot of the scaffold may be easily counted. But some have had a vivid
experience of it in dreams; they have gone through it all, to the
sensation of the knife at their throat, at the moment when waking and
daylight come to release them.--Well, the sensation to which the
Councillor of State was a victim at five in the morning in Crevel's
handsome and elegant bed, was immeasurably worse than that of feeling
himself bound to the fatal block in the presence of ten thousand
spectators looking at you with twenty thousand sparks of fire.

Valerie was asleep in a graceful attitude. She was lovely, as a woman
is who is lovely enough to look so even in sleep. It is art invading
nature; in short, a living picture.

In his horizontal position the Baron's eyes were but three feet above
the floor. His gaze, wandering idly, as that of a man who is just
awake and collecting his ideas, fell on a door painted with flowers by
Jan, an artist disdainful of fame. The Baron did not indeed see twenty
thousand flaming eyes, like the man condemned to death; he saw but
one, of which the shaft was really more piercing than the thousands on
the Public Square.

Now this sensation, far rarer in the midst of enjoyment even than that
of a man condemned to death, was one for which many a splenetic
Englishman would certainly pay a high price. The Baron lay there,
horizontal still, and literally bathed in cold sweat. He tried to
doubt the fact; but this murderous eye had a voice. A sound of
whispering was heard through the door.

"So long as it is nobody but Crevel playing a trick on me!" said the
Baron to himself, only too certain of an intruder in the temple.

The door was opened. The Majesty of the French Law, which in all
documents fol