“Lucien de Rubempre is in custody, your husband is conducting the inquiry; I will answer for the poor boy’s innocence; see that he is released within twenty-four hours.—­This is not all.  Some one will ask to-morrow to see Lucien in private in his cell; your husband may be present if he chooses, so long as he is not discovered.  The King looks for high courage in his magistrates in the difficult position in which he will presently find himself; I will bring your husband forward, and recommend him as a man devoted to the King even at the risk of his head.  Our friend Camusot will be made first a councillor, and then the President of Court somewhere or other.—­Good-bye.—­I am under orders, you will excuse me, I know?

“You will not only oblige the public prosecutor, who cannot give an opinion in this affair; you will save the life of a dying woman, Madame de Serizy.  So you will not lack support.

“In short, you see, I put my trust in you, I need not say—­you know——­”

She laid a finger to her lips and disappeared.

“And I had not a chance of telling her that Madame d’Espard wants to see Lucien on the scaffold!” thought the judge’s wife as she returned to her hackney cab.

She got home in such a state of anxiety that her husband, on seeing her, asked: 

“What is the matter, Amelie?”

“We stand between two fires.”

She told her husband of her interview with the Duchess, speaking in his ear for fear the maid should be listening at the door.

“Now, which of them has the most power?” she said in conclusion.  “The Marquise was very near getting you into trouble in the silly business of the commission on her husband, and we owe everything to the Duchess.

“One made vague promises, while the other tells you you shall first be Councillor and then President.—­Heaven forbid I should advise you; I will never meddle in matters of business; still, I am bound to repeat exactly what is said at Court and what goes on——­”

“But, Amelie, you do not know what the Prefet of police sent me this morning, and by whom?  By one of the most important agents of the superior police, the Bibi-Lupin of politics, who told me that the Government had a secret interest in this trial.—­Now let us dine and go to the Varietes.  We will talk all this over to-night in my private room, for I shall need your intelligence; that of a judge may not perhaps be enough——­”

Nine magistrates out of ten would deny the influence of the wife over her husband in such cases; but though this may be a remarkable exception in society, it may be insisted on as true, even if improbable.  The magistrate is like the priest, especially in Paris, where the best of the profession are to be found; he rarely speaks of his business in the Courts, excepting of settled cases.  Not only do magistrates’ wives affect to know nothing; they have enough sense of propriety to understand that it would damage their husbands if, when they are told some secret, they allowed their knowledge to be suspected.