nocency, and his goal, the lowest depths of degradation and sham,
was so direct an appeal to his last chord of poetic feeling, that the
unhappy fellow melted into tears. For four hours he wept, as rigid in
appearance as a figure of stone, but enduring the subversion of all his
hopes, the crushing of all his social vanity, and the utter overthrow
of his pride, smarting in each separate _I_ that exists in an ambitious
man--a lover, a success, a dandy, a Parisian, a poet, a libertine, and a
favorite. Everything in him was broken by this fall as of Icarus.

Carlos Herrera, on the other hand, as soon as he was locked into his
cell and found himself alone, began pacing it to and fro like the polar
bear in his cage. He carefully examined the door and assured himself
that, with the exception of the peephole, there was not a crack in it.
He sounded all the walls, he looked up the funnel down which a dim light
came, and he said to himself, "I am safe enough!"

He sat down in a corner where the eye of a prying warder at the grating
of the peephole could not see him. Then he took off his wig, and hastily
ungummed a piece of paper that did duty as lining. The side of the paper
next his head was so greasy that it looked like the very texture of the
wig. If it had occurred to Bibi-Lupin to snatch off the wig to establish
the identity of the Spaniard with Jacques Collin, he would never have
thought twice about the paper, it looked so exactly like part of the
wigmaker's work. The other side was still fairly white, and clean enough
to have a few lines written on it. The delicate and tiresome task of
unsticking it had been begun in La Force; two hours would not have been
long enough; it had taken him half of the day before. The prisoner began
by tearing this precious scrap of paper so as to have a strip four or
five lines wide, which he divided into several bits; he then replaced
his store of paper in the same strange hiding-place, after damping the
gummed side so as to make it stick again. He felt in a lock of his hair
for one of those pencil leads as thin as a stout pin, then recently
invented by Susse, and which he had put in with some gum; he broke off
a scrap long enough to write with and small enough to hide in his ear.
Having made these preparations with the rapidity and certainty of hand
peculiar to old convicts, who are as light-fingered as monkeys, Jacques
Collin sat down on the edge of his bed to meditate on his instructions
to