Voltaire and Rousseau.--The
doctor, to feel my pulse, as it were, and see if sickness had subdued
me--'You saw Monsieur 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 a