. "Go on, then,
monsieur," said the Duc de Chaulieu. "You can set down the charges of
the case among those you are in the habit of undertaking."

Corentin bowed and went away.

Henri de Lenoncourt, for whom Ferdinand de Grandlieu had a carriage
brought out, went off forthwith to the King, whom he was privileged to
see at all times in right of his office.

Thus all the various interests that had got entangled from the highest
to the lowest ranks of society were to meet presently in Monsieur
de Granville's room at the Palais, all brought together by necessity
embodied in three men--Justice in Monsieur de Granville, and the family
in Corentin, face to face with Jacques Collin, the terrible foe who
represented social crime in its fiercest energy.

What a duel is that between justice and arbitrary wills on one side and
the hulks and cunning on the other! The hulks--symbolical of that daring
which throws off calculation and reflection, which avails itself of any
means, which has none of the hyprocrisy of high-handed justice, but is
the hideous outcome of the starving stomach--the swift and bloodthirsty
pretext of hunger. Is it not attack as against self-protection, theft as
against property? The terrible quarrel between the social state and the
natural man, fought out on the narrowest possible ground! In short, it
is a terrible and vivid image of those compromises, hostile to social
interests, which the representatives of authority, when they lack power,
submit to with the fiercest rebels.

When Monsieur Camusot was announced, the public prosecutor signed that
he should be admitted. Monsieur de Granville had foreseen this visit,
and wished to come to an understanding with the examining judge as to
how to wind up this business of Lucien's death. The end could no
longer be that on which he had decided the day before in agreement with
Camusot, before the suicide of the hapless poet.

"Sit down, Monsieur Camusot," said Monsieur de Granville, dropping into
his armchair. The public prosecutor, alone with the inferior judge,
made no secret of his depressed state. Camusot looked at Monsieur de
Granville and observed his almost livid pallor, and such utter fatigue,
such complete prostration, as betrayed greater suffering perhaps than
that of the condemned man to whom the clerk had announced the rejection
of his appeal. And yet that announcement, in the forms of justice, is a
much as to say, "Prepare to die; your last hour has co