nearer to the desired
goal, for not a soul in the quarter ventured to doubt the word of this
saintly individual. His fawning manners and insinuating language varied
according to the people addressed. He adapted himself to all,
contradicting no one, and, while austere himself, he flattered the tastes
of others. In the various houses where he visited his conversation was
serious, grave, and sententious; and, as we have seen, he could quote
Scripture with the readiness of a theologian. In the shop, when he had
to deal with the lower classes, he showed himself acquainted with their
modes of expression, and spoke the Billingsgate of the market-women,
which he had acquired in the rue Comtesse d'Artois, treating them
familiarly, and they generally addressed him as "gossip Denies." By his
own account he easily judged the characters of the various people with
whom he came in contact.

However, Pere Cartault's prophecy was not fulfilled: the blessing of
Heaven did not descend on the Legrand establishment. There seemed to be
a succession of misfortunes which all Derues' zeal and care as shopman
could neither prevent nor repair. He by no means contented himself with
parading an idle and fruitless hypocrisy, and his most abominable
deceptions were not those displayed in the light of day. He watched by
night: his singular organisation, outside the ordinary laws of nature,
appeared able to dispense with sleep. Gliding about on tiptoe, opening
doors noiselessly, with all the skill of an accomplished thief, he
pillaged shop and cellar, and sold his plunder in remote parts of the
town under assumed names. It is difficult to understand how his strength
supported the fatigue of this double existence; he had barely arrived at
puberty, and art had been obliged to assist the retarded development of
nature. But he lived only for evil, and the Spirit of Evil supplied the
physical vigour which was wanting. An insane love of money (the only
passion he knew) brought him by degrees back to his starting-point of
crime; he concealed it in hiding-places wrought in the thick walls, in
holes dug out by his nails. As soon as he got any, he brought it exactly
as a wild beast brings a piece of bleeding flesh to his lair; and often,
by the glimmer of a dark lantern, kneeling in adoration before this
shameful idol, his eyes sparkling with ferocious joy, with a smile which
suggested a hyena's delight over its prey, he would contemplate his
money,