He sat down in a corner where the eye of a prying warder at the grating of the peephole could not see him.  Then he took off his wig, and hastily ungummed a piece of paper that did duty as lining.  The side of the paper next his head was so greasy that it looked like the very texture of the wig.  If it had occurred to Bibi-Lupin to snatch off the wig to establish the identity of the Spaniard with Jacques Collin, he would never have thought twice about the paper, it looked so exactly like part of the wigmaker’s work.  The other side was still fairly white, and clean enough to have a few lines written on it.  The delicate and tiresome task of unsticking it had been begun in La Force; two hours would not have been long enough; it had taken him half of the day before.  The prisoner began by tearing this precious scrap of paper so as to have a strip four or five lines wide, which he divided into several bits; he then replaced his store of paper in the same strange hiding-place, after damping the gummed side so as to make it stick again.  He felt in a lock of his hair for one of those pencil leads as thin as a stout pin, then recently invented by Susse, and which he had put in with some gum; he broke off a scrap long enough to write with and small enough to hide in his ear.  Having made these preparations with the rapidity and certainty of hand peculiar to old convicts, who are as light-fingered as monkeys, Jacques Collin sat down on the edge of his bed to meditate on his instructions to Asie, in perfect confidence that he should come across her, so entirely did he rely on the woman’s genius.

“During the preliminary examination,” he reflected, “I pretended to be a Spaniard and spoke broken French, appealed to my Ambassador, and alleged diplomatic privilege, not understanding anything I was asked, the whole performance varied by fainting, pauses, sighs—­in short, all the vagaries of a dying man.  I must stick to that.  My papers are all regular.  Asie and I can eat up Monsieur Camusot; he is no great shakes!

“Now I must think of Lucien; he must be made to pull himself together.  I must get at the boy at whatever cost, and show him some plan of conduct, otherwise he will give himself up, give me up, lose all!  He must be taught his lesson before he is examined.  And besides, I must find some witnesses to swear to my being a priest!”

Such was the position, moral and physical, of these two prisoners, whose fate at the moment depended on Monsieur Camusot, examining judge to the Inferior Court of the Seine, and sovereign master, during the time granted to him by the Code, of the smallest details of their existence, since he alone could grant leave for them to be visited by the chaplains, the doctor, or any one else in the world.