he Countess wore a plain brown dress, an old black shawl, and a
velvet bonnet from which the flowers had been removed, and the whole
covered up under a thick lace veil.

"You received our note?" said she to Camusot, whose dismay she mistook
for respectful admiration.

"Alas! but too late, Madame la Comtesse," replied the lawyer, whose
tact and wit failed him excepting in his chambers and in presence of a
prisoner.

"Too late! How?"

She looked at Monsieur de Granville, and saw consternation written in
his face. "It cannot be, it must not be too late!" she added, in the
tone of a despot.

Women, pretty women, in the position of Madame de Serizy, are the
spoiled children of French civilization. If the women of other countries
knew what a woman of fashion is in Paris, a woman of wealth and rank,
they would all want to come and enjoy that splendid royalty. The women
who recognize no bonds but those of propriety, no law but the petty
charter which has been more than once alluded to in this _Comedie
Humaine_ as the ladies' Code, laugh at the statutes framed by men. They
say everything, they do not shrink from any blunder or hesitate at any
folly, for they all accept the fact that they are irresponsible
beings, answerable for nothing on earth but their good repute and their
children. They say the most preposterous things with a laugh, and are
ready on every occasion to repeat the speech made in the early days of
her married life by pretty Madame de Bauvan to her husband, whom she
came to fetch away from the Palais: "Make haste and pass sentence, and
come away."

"Madame," said the public prosecutor, "Monsieur Lucien de Rubempre is
not guilty either of robbery or of poisoning; but Monsieur Camusot has
led him to confess a still greater crime."

"What is that?" she asked.

"He acknowledged," said Monsieur Camusot in her ear, "that he is the
friend and pupil of an escaped convict. The Abbe Carlos Herrera, the
Spaniard with whom he has been living for the last seven years, is the
notorious Jacques Collin."

Madame de Serizy felt as if it were a blow from an iron rod at each word
spoken by the judge, but this name was the finishing stroke.

"And the upshot of all this?" she said, in a voice that was no more than
a breath.

"Is," Monsieur de Granville went on, finishing the Countess' sentence in
an undertone, "that the convict will be committed for trial, and that if
Lucien is not committed with him as having profited