began by obeying the two fine
ladies--he lighted a taper, and burned the letter written by the
Duchess. The man bowed respectfully.

"Then Madame de Serizy is coming here?" asked Camusot.

"The carriage is being brought round."

At this moment Coquart came in to tell Monsieur Camusot that the public
prosecutor expected him.

Oppressed by the blunder he had committed, in view of his ambitions,
though to the better ends of justice, the lawyer, in whom seven years'
experience had perfected the sharpness that comes to a man who in his
practice has had to measure his wits against the grisettes of Paris,
was anxious to have some shield against the resentment of two women of
fashion. The taper in which he had burned the note was still alight,
and he used it to seal up the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse's notes to
Lucien--about thirty in all--and Madame de Serizy's somewhat voluminous
correspondence.

Then he waited on the public prosecutor.

The Palais de Justice is a perplexing maze of buildings piled one above
another, some fine and dignified, others very mean, the whole disfigured
by its lack of unity. The _Salle des Pas-Perdus_ is the largest known
hall, but its nakedness is hideous, and distresses the eye. This vast
Cathedral of the Law crushes the Supreme Court. The Galerie Marchande
ends in two drain-like passages. From this corridor there is a double
staircase, a little larger than that of the Criminal Courts, and under
it a large double door. The stairs lead down to one of the Assize
Courts, and the doors open into another. In some years the number
of crimes committed in the circuit of the Seine is great enough to
necessitate the sitting of two Benches.

Close by are the public prosecutor's offices, the attorney's room and
library, the chambers of the attorney-general, and those of the public
prosecutor's deputies. All these purlieus, to use a generic term,
communicate by narrow spiral stairs and the dark passages, which are a
disgrace to the architecture not of Paris only, but of all France.
The interior arrangement of the sovereign court of justice outdoes our
prisons in all that is most hideous. The writer describing our manners
and customs would shrink from the necessity of depicting the squalid
corridor of about a metre in width, in which the witnesses wait in the
Superior Criminal Court. As to the stove which warms the court itself,
it would disgrace a cafe on the Boulevard Mont-Parnasse.

The public prosec