in convulsions.

Four constables had with great difficulty brought the Abbe Carlos
downstairs to Esther's room, where the lawyers and the gendarmes were
assembled.

"That was the best thing he could do if he should be guilty," replied
the public prosecutor.

"Do you believe that he is ill?" the police commissioner asked.

The police is always incredulous.

The three lawyers had spoken, as may be imagined, in a whisper;
but Jacques Collin had guessed from their faces the subject under
discussion, and had taken advantage of it to make the first brief
examination which is gone through on arrest absolutely impossible and
useless; he had stammered out sentences in which Spanish and French were
so mingled as to make nonsense.

At La Force this farce had been all the more successful in the first
instance because the head of the "safety" force--an abbreviation of
the title "Head of the brigade of the guardians of public
safety"--Bibi-Lupin, who had long since taken Jacques Collin into
custody at Madame Vauquer's boarding-house, had been sent on special
business into the country, and his deputy was a man who hoped to succeed
him, but to whom the convict was unknown.

Bibi-Lupin, himself formerly a convict, and a comrade of Jacques
Collin's on the hulks, was his personal enemy. This hostility had its
rise in quarrels in which Jacques Collin had always got the upper hand,
and in the supremacy over his fellow-prisoners which _Trompe-la-Mort_
had always assumed. And then, for ten years now, Jacques Collin had been
the ruling providence of released convicts in Paris, their head, their
adviser, and their banker, and consequently Bibi-Lupin's antagonist.

Thus, though placed in solitary confinement, he trusted to the
intelligent and unreserved devotion of Asie, his right hand, and
perhaps, too, to Paccard, his left hand, who, as he flattered himself,
might return to his allegiance when once that thrifty subaltern had
safely bestowed the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs that he had
stolen. This was the reason why his attention had been so superhumanly
alert all along the road. And, strange to say! his hopes were about to
be amply fulfilled.

The two solid side-walls of the archway were covered, to a height of
six feet, with a permanent dado of mud formed of the splashes from the
gutter; for, in those days, the foot passenger had no protection from
the constant traffic of vehicles and from what was called the kicking o