wn integrity.
When the cashier entered, du Tillet motioned him to take notice of
Cesar.

"Monsieur Legras, bring me ten thousand francs, and a note of hand for
that amount, drawn to my order, at ninety days' sight, by monsieur, who
is Monsieur Cesar Birotteau, you know."

Du Tillet cut the pate, poured out a glass of claret, and urged Cesar
to eat. The poor man felt he was saved, and gave way to convulsive
laughter; he played with his watch-chain, and only put a mouthful into
his mouth, when du Tillet said to him, "You are not eating!" Birotteau
thus betrayed the depths of the abyss into which du Tillet's hand had
plunged him, from which that hand now withdrew him, and into which it
had the power to plunge him again. When the cashier returned, and Cesar
signed the note, and felt the ten bank-notes in his pocket, he was
no longer master of himself. A moment sooner, and the Bank, his
neighborhood, every one, was to know that he could not meet his
payments, and he must have told his ruin to his wife; now, all was safe!
The joy of this deliverance equalled in its intensity the tortures of
his peril. The eyes of the poor man moistened, in spite of himself.

"What is the matter with you, my dear master?" asked du Tillet. "Would
you not do for me to-morrow what I do for you to-day? Is it not as
simple as saying, How do you do?"

"Du Tillet," said the worthy man, with gravity and emphasis, and rising
to take the hand of his former clerk, "I give you back my esteem."

"What! had I lost it?" cried du Tillet, so violently stabbed in the very
bosom of his prosperity that the color came into his face.

"Lost?--well, not precisely," said Birotteau, thunder-struck at his own
stupidity: "they told me certain things about your _liaison_ with Madame
Roguin. The devil! taking the wife of another man--"

"You are beating round the bush, old fellow," thought du Tillet, and
as the words crossed his mind he came back to his original project,
and vowed to bring that virtue low, to trample it under foot, to render
despicable in the marts of Paris the honorable and virtuous merchant who
had caught him, red-handed, in a theft. All hatreds, public or private,
from woman to woman, from man to man, have no other cause then some
such detection. People do not hate each other for injured interests, for
wounds, not even for a blow; all such wrongs can be redressed. But to
have been seized, _flagrante delicto_, in a base act! The duel which
follo