ioned, how will he carry it off? Poor boy, and I have brought
him to this! It is that rascal Paccard and that sneak Europe who have
caused all this rumpus by collaring the seven hundred and fifty thousand
francs for the certificate Nucingen gave Esther. That precious pair
tripped us up at the last step; but I will make them pay dear for their
pranks.

"One day more and Lucien would have been a rich man; he might have
married his Clotilde de Grandlieu.--Then the boy would have been all
my own!--And to think that our fate depends on a look, on a blush of
Lucien's under Camusot's eye, who sees everything, and has all a judge's
wits about him! For when he showed me the letters we tipped each other
a wink in which we took each other's measure, and he guessed that I can
make Lucien's lady-loves fork out."

This soliloquy lasted for three hours. His torments were so great that
they were too much for that frame of iron and vitriol; Jacques Collin,
whose brain felt on fire with insanity, suffered such fearful thirst
that he unconsciously drank up all the water contained in one of the
pails with which the cell was supplied, forming, with the bed, all its
furniture.

"If he loses his head, what will become of him?--for the poor child
has not Theodore's tenacity," said he to himself, as he lay down on the
camp-bed--like a bed in a guard-room.

A word must here be said about this Theodore, remembered by Jacques
Collin at such a critical moment. Theodore Calvi, a young Corsican,
imprisoned for life at the age of eighteen for eleven murders, thanks to
the influential interference paid for with vast sums, had been made the
fellow convict of Jacques Collin, to whom he was chained, in 1819 and
1820. Jacques Collin's last escape, one of his finest inventions--for he
had got out disguised as a gendarme leading Theodore Calvi as he was, a
convict called before the commissary of police--had been effected in the
seaport of Rochefort, where the convicts die by dozens, and where, it
was hoped, these two dangerous rascals would have ended their days.
Though they escaped together, the difficulties of their flight had
forced them to separate. Theodore was caught and restored to the hulks.

Indeed, a life with Lucien, a youth innocent of all crime, who had only
minor sins on his conscience, dawned on him as bright and glorious as a
summer sun; while with Theodore, Jacques Collin could look forward to no
end but the scaffold after a career