ywhere. Above all, send me a word we will agree upon to let me
know if the Spanish priest is officially recognized as Jacques Collin.
Get your business at the Palais over by two o'clock, and I will have
arranged for you to have an interview with the Keeper of the Seals;
perhaps I may find him with the Marquise d'Espard."

Camusot stood squarely with a look of admiration that made his knowing
wife smile.

"Now, come to dinner and be cheerful," said she in conclusion. "Why,
you see! We have been only two years in Paris, and here you are on the
highroad to be made Councillor before the end of the year. From that
to the Presidency of a court, my dear, there is no gulf but what some
political service may bridge."

This conjugal sitting shows how greatly the deeds and the lightest words
of Jacques Collin, the lowest personage in this drama, involved the
honor of the families among whom he had planted his now dead protege.

At the Conciergerie Lucien's death and Madame de Serizy's incursion had
produced such a block in the wheels of the machinery that the Governor
had forgotten to remove the sham priest from his dungeon-cell.

Though more than one instance is on record of the death of a prisoner
during his preliminary examination, it was a sufficiently rare event
to disturb the warders, the clerk, and the Governor, and hinder their
working with their usual serenity. At the same time, to them the
important fact was not the handsome young fellow so suddenly become a
corpse, but the breakage of the wrought-iron bar of the outer prison
gate by the frail hands of a fine lady. And indeed, as soon as the
public prosecutor and Comte Octave de Bauvan had gone off with Monsieur
de Serizy and his unconscious wife, the Governor, clerk, and turnkeys
gathered round the gate, after letting out Monsieur Lebrun, the prison
doctor, who had been called in to certify to Lucien's death, in concert
with the "death doctor" of the district in which the unfortunate youth
had been lodging.

In Paris, the "death doctor" is the medical officer whose duty it is in
each district to register deaths and certify to their causes.

With the rapid insight for which he was known, Monsieur de Granville had
judged it necessary, for the honor of the families concerned, to
have the certificate of Lucien's death deposited at the Mairie of the
district in which the Quai Malaquais lies, as the deceased had resided
there, and to have the body carried from his