m that he yet had a great future before
him, he had made him his chattel.

But, indeed, no sacrifice was too great for this strange man when it
was to gratify his second self. With all his strength, he was so weak to
this creature of his making that he had even told him all his secrets.
Perhaps this abstract complicity was a bond the more between them.

Since the day when La Torpille had been snatched away, Lucien had known
on what a vile foundation his good fortune rested. That priest's robe
covered Jacques Collin, a man famous on the hulks, who ten years since
had lived under the homely name of Vautrin in the Maison Vauquer, where
Rastignac and Bianchon were at that time boarders.

Jacques Collin, known as _Trompe-la-Mort_, had escaped from Rochefort
almost as soon as he was recaptured, profiting by the example of the
famous Comte de Sainte-Helene, while modifying all that was ill planned
in Coignard's daring scheme. To take the place of an honest man and
carry on the convict's career is a proposition of which the two terms
are too contradictory for a disastrous outcome not to be inevitable,
especially in Paris; for, by establishing himself in a family, a convict
multiplies tenfold the perils of such a substitution. And to be safe
from all investigation, must not a man assume a position far above the
ordinary interests of life. A man of the world is subject to risks such
as rarely trouble those who have no contact with the world; hence the
priest's gown is the safest disguise when it can be authenticated by an
exemplary life in solitude and inactivity.

"So a priest I will be," said the legally dead man, who was quite
determined to resuscitate as a figure in the world, and to satisfy
passions as strange as himself.

The civil war caused by the Constitution of 1812 in Spain, whither this
energetic man had betaken himself, enabled him to murder secretly the
real Carlos Herrera from an ambush. This ecclesiastic, the bastard son
of a grandee, long since deserted by his father, and not knowing to what
woman he owed his birth, was intrusted by King Ferdinand VII., to whom
a bishop had recommended him, with a political mission to France. The
bishop, the only man who took any interest in Carlos Herrera, died
while this foundling son of the Church was on his journey from Cadiz
to Madrid, and from Madrid to France. Delighted to have met with this
longed-for opportunity, and under the most desirable conditions, Jacques
Coll