l'Abbe?' said he.--Well, I imitated the
great Montesquieu. Yes, I looked at the doctor--see, like this," and
he turned to show three-quarters face, like his portrait, and extended
his hand authoritatively--"and I said:

"The slave was here,
He showed his order, but he nothing gained.

"_His order_ is a pretty jest, showing that even in death Monsieur le
President de Montesquieu preserved his elegant wit, for they had sent
him a Jesuit. I admire that passage--I cannot say of his life, but of
his death--the passage--another joke!--The passage from life to death
--the Passage Montesquieu!"

Victorin gazed sadly at his father-in-law, wondering whether folly and
vanity were not forces on a par with true greatness of soul. The
causes that act on the springs of the soul seem to be quite
independent of the results. Can it be that the fortitude which upholds
a great criminal is the same as that which a Champcenetz so proudly
walks to the scaffold?

By the end of the week Madame Crevel was buried, after dreadful
sufferings; and Crevel followed her within two days. Thus the
marriage-contract was annulled. Crevel was heir to Valerie.

On the very day after the funeral, the friar called again on the
lawyer, who received him in perfect silence. The monk held out his
hand without a word, and without a word Victorin Hulot gave him eighty
thousand-franc notes, taken from a sum of money found in Crevel's
desk.

Young Madame Hulot inherited the estate of Presles and thirty thousand
francs a year.

Madame Crevel had bequeathed a sum of three hundred thousand francs to
Baron Hulot. Her scrofulous boy Stanislas was to inherit, at his
majority, the Hotel Crevel and eighty thousand francs a year.

Among the many noble associations founded in Paris by Catholic
charity, there is one, originated by Madame de la Chanterie, for
promoting civil and religious marriages between persons who have
formed a voluntary but illicit union. Legislators, who draw large
revenues from the registration fees, and the Bourgeois dynasty, which
benefits by the notary's profits, affect to overlook the fact that
three-fourths of the poorer class cannot afford fifteen francs for the
marriage-contract. The pleaders, a sufficiently vilified body,
gratuitously defend the cases of the indigent, while the notaries have
not as yet agreed to charge nothing for the marriage-contract of the
poor. As to the revenue collectors, the whole machinery of