Rubempre was his son."

The poet listened in silence, and with a look that was terrible to
behold.

"I am done for!" he cried.

"A man is not done for who is faithful to the path of honor and truth,"
said the judge.

"But you will commit Jacques Collin for trial?" said Lucien.

"Undoubtedly," said Camusot, who aimed at making Lucien talk. "Speak
out."

But in spite of all his persuasion and remonstrances, Lucien would say
no more. Reflection had come too late, as it does to all men who are the
slaves of impulse. There lies the difference between the poet and
the man of action; one gives way to feeling to reproduce it in living
images, his judgement comes in after; the other feels and judges both at
once.

Lucien remained pale and gloomy; he saw himself at the bottom of the
precipice, down which the examining judge had rolled him by the apparent
candor which had entrapped his poet's soul. He had betrayed, not his
benefactor, but an accomplice who had defended their position with the
courage of a lion, and a skill that showed no flaw. Where Jacques Collin
had saved everything by his daring, Lucien, the man of brains, had
lost all by his lack of intelligence and reflection. This infamous lie
against which he revolted had screened a yet more infamous truth.

Utterly confounded by the judge's skill, overpowered by his cruel
dexterity, by the swiftness of the blows he had dealt him while
making use of the errors of a life laid bare as probes to search his
conscience, Lucien sat like an animal which the butcher's pole-axe had
failed to kill. Free and innocent when he came before the judge, in a
moment his own avowal had made him feel criminal.

To crown all, as a final grave irony, Camusot, cold and calm,
pointed out to Lucien that his self-betrayal was the result of a
misapprehension. Camusot was thinking of Jacques Collin's announcing
himself as Lucien's father; while Lucien, wholly absorbed by his fear of
seeing his confederacy with an escaped convict made public, had imitated
the famous inadvertency of the murderers of Ibycus.

One of Royer-Collard's most famous achievements was proclaiming the
constant triumph of natural feeling over engrafted sentiments, and
defending the cause of anterior oaths by asserting that the law of
hospitality, for instance, ought to be regarded as binding to the point
of negativing the obligation of a judicial oath. He promulgated this
theory, in the face of the world, from the Fr