Fraisier laughed, and drew the bolt lest his housekeeper should interrupt Mme. Cibot’s confidences.

“Well, madame, explain your business,” said he, making another effort to drape himself in the dressing-gown.  “Any one recommended to me by the only friend I have in the world may count upon me—­I may say —­absolutely.”

For half an hour Mme. Cibot talked, and the man of law made no interruption of any sort; his face wore the expression of curious interest with which a young soldier listens to a pensioner of “The Old Guard.”  Fraisier’s silence and acquiescence, the rapt attention with which he appeared to listen to a torrent of gossip similar to the samples previously given, dispelled some of the prejudices inspired in La Cibot’s mind by his squalid surroundings.  The little lawyer with the black-speckled green eyes was in reality making a study of his client.  When at length she came to a stand and looked to him to speak, he was seized with a fit of the complaint known as a “churchyard cough,” and had recourse to an earthenware basin half full of herb tea, which he drained.

“But for Poulain, my dear madame, I should have been dead before this,” said Fraisier, by way of answer to the portress’ look of motherly compassion; “but he will bring me round, he says—­”

As all the client’s confidences appeared to have slipped from the memory of her legal adviser, she began to cast about for a way of taking leave of a man so apparently near death.

“In an affair of this kind, madame,” continued the attorney from Mantes, suddenly returning to business, “there are two things which it is most important to know.  In the first place, whether the property is sufficient to be worth troubling about; and in the second, who the next-of-kin may be; for if the property is the booty, the next-of-kin is the enemy.”

La Cibot immediately began to talk of Remonencq and Elie Magus, and said that the shrewd couple valued the pictures at six hundred thousand francs.

“Would they take them themselves at that price?” inquired the lawyer.  “You see, madame, that men of business are shy of pictures.  A picture may mean a piece of canvas worth a couple of francs or a painting worth two hundred thousand.  Now, paintings worth two hundred thousand francs are usually well known; and what errors in judgment people make in estimating even the most famous pictures of all!  There was once a great capitalist whose collection was admired, visited, and engraved —­actually engraved!  He was supposed to have spent millions of francs on it.  He died, as men must, and—­well, his genuine pictures did not fetch more than two hundred thousand francs!  You must let me see these gentlemen.—­Now for the next-of-kin,” and Fraisier again relapsed into his attitude of listener.

When President Camusot’s name came up, he nodded with a grimace which riveted Mme. Cibot’s attention.  She tried to read the forehead and the villainous face, and found what is called in business a “wooden head.”