What is it, Madeleine?" asked Madame Camusot, seeing her maid come
into the room with the particular air that servants assume in critical
moments.

"Madame," said Madeleine, "monsieur has just come in from Court; but he
looks so upset, and is in such a state, that I think perhaps it would be
well for you to go to his room."

"Did he say anything?" asked Madame Camusot.

"No, madame; but we never have seen monsieur look like that; he looks
as if he were going to be ill, his face is yellow--he seems all to
pieces----"

Madame Camusot waited for no more; she rushed out of her room and flew
to her husband's study. She found the lawyer sitting in an armchair,
pale and dazed, his legs stretched out, his head against the back of it,
his hands hanging limp, exactly as if he were sinking into idiotcy.

"What is the matter, my dear?" said the young woman in alarm.

"Oh! my poor Amelie, the most dreadful thing has happened--I am still
trembling. Imagine, the public prosecutor--no, Madame de Serizy--that
is--I do not know where to begin."

"Begin at the end," said Madame Camusot.

"Well, just as Monsieur Popinot, in the council room of the first Court,
had put the last signature to the ruling of 'insufficient cause' for the
apprehension of Lucien de Rubempre on the ground of my report, setting
him at liberty--in fact, the whole thing was done, the clerk was going
off with the minute book, and I was quit of the whole business--the
President of the Court came in and took up the papers. 'You are
releasing a dead man,' said he, with chilly irony; 'the young man is
gone, as Monsieur de Bonald says, to appear before his natural Judge. He
died of apoplexy----'

"I breathed again, thinking it was sudden illness.

"'As I understand you, Monsieur le President,' said Monsieur Popinot,
'it is a case of apoplexy like Pichegru's.'

"'Gentlemen,' said the President then, very gravely, 'you must please
to understand that for the outside world Lucien de Rubempre died of an
aneurism.'

"We all looked at each other. 'Very great people are concerned in this
deplorable business,' said the President. 'God grant for your sake,
Monsieur Camusot, though you did no less than your duty, that Madame de
Serizy may not go mad from the shock she has had. She was carried away
almost dead. I have just met our public prosecutor in a painful state of
despair.'--'You have made a mess of it, my dear Camusot,' he added in
my ear.--I assure you, my dear,