veins? Don't you know that it was that idiot
of a judge who killed him?--For you were fond of my Lucien, and he loved
you! I know you by heart, sir. The dear boy would tell me everything at
night when he came in; I used to put him to bed as a nurse tucks up a
child, and I made him tell me everything. He confided everything to me,
even his least sensations!

"The best of mothers never loved an only son so tenderly as I loved
that angel! If only you knew! All that is good sprang up in his heart as
flowers grow in the fields. He was weak; it was his only fault, weak as
the string of a lyre, which is so strong when it is taut. These are the
most beautiful natures; their weakness is simply tenderness, admiration,
the power of expanding in the sunshine of art, of love, of the beauty
God has made for man in a thousand shapes!--In short, Lucien was a woman
spoiled. Oh! what could I not say to that brute beast who had just gone
out of the room!

"I tell you, monsieur, in my degree, as a prisoner before his judge,
I did what God A'mighty would have done for His Son if, hoping to save
Him, He had gone with Him before Pilate!"

A flood of tears fell from the convict's light tawny eyes, which just
now had glared like those of a wolf starved by six months' snow in the
plains of the Ukraine. He went on:

"That dolt would listen to nothing, and he killed the boy!--I tell you,
sir, I bathed the child's corpse in my tears, crying out to the Power
I do not know, and which is above us all! I, who do not believe in
God!--(For if I were not a materialist, I should not be myself.)

"I have told everything when I say that. You don't know--no man knows
what suffering is. I alone know it. The fire of anguish so dried up my
tears, that all last night I could not weep. Now I can, because I feel
that you can understand me. I saw you, sitting there just now, an Image
of Justice. Oh! monsieur, may God--for I am beginning to believe in
Him--preserve you from ever being as bereft as I am! That cursed judge
has robbed me of my soul, Monsieur le Comte! At this moment they are
burying my life, my beauty, my virtue, my conscience, all my powers!
Imagine a dog from which a chemist had extracted the blood.--That's me!
I am that dog----

"And that is why I have come to tell you that I am Jacques Collin, and
to give myself up. I made up my mind to it this morning when they came
and carried away the body I was kissing like a madman--like a mother--as
th