“There was a certain Vautrin in the house at the time?” asked Camusot.

“Oh, monsieur, that is quite a long story; he was a horrible man, from the galleys——­”

“You helped to get him arrested?”

“That is not true sir.”

“You are in the presence of the Law; be careful,” said Monsieur Camusot severely.

Madame Poiret was silent.

“Try to remember,” Camusot went on.  “Do you recollect the man?  Would you know him again?”

“I think so.”

“Is this the man?”

Madame Poiret put on her “eye-preservers,” and looked at the Abbe Carlos Herrera.

“It is his build, his height; and yet—­no—­if—­Monsieur le Juge,” she said, “if I could see his chest I should recognize him at once.”

The magistrate and his clerk could not help laughing, notwithstanding the gravity of their office; Jacques Collin joined in their hilarity, but discreetly.  The prisoner had not put on his coat after Bibi-Lupin had removed it, and at a sign from the judge he obligingly opened his shirt.

“Yes, that is his fur trimming, sure enough!—­But it has worn gray, Monsieur Vautrin,” cried Madame Poiret.

“What have you to say to that?” asked the judge of the prisoner.

“That she is mad,” replied Jacques Collin.

“Bless me!  If I had a doubt—­for his face is altered—­that voice would be enough.  He is the man who threatened me.  Ah! and those are his eyes!”

“The police agent and this woman,” said Camusot, speaking to Jacques Collin, “cannot possibly have conspired to say the same thing, for neither of them had seen you till now.  How do you account for that?”

“Justice has blundered more conspicuously even than it does now in accepting the evidence of a woman who recognizes a man by the hair on his chest and the suspicions of a police agent,” replied Jacques Collin.  “I am said to resemble a great criminal in voice, eyes, and build; that seems a little vague.  As to the memory which would prove certain relations between Madame and my Sosie—­which she does not blush to own—­you yourself laughed at.  Allow me, monsieur, in the interests of truth, which I am far more anxious to establish for my own sake than you can be for the sake of justice, to ask this lady —­Madame Foiret——­”

“Poiret.”

“Poret—­excuse me, I am a Spaniard—­whether she remembers the other persons who lived in this—­what did you call the house?”

“A boarding-house,” said Madame Poiret.

“I do not know what that is.”

“A house where you can dine and breakfast by subscription.”

“You are right,” said Camusot, with a favorable nod to Jacques Collin, whose apparent good faith in suggesting means to arrive at some conclusion struck him greatly.  “Try to remember the boarders who were in the house when Jacques Collin was apprehended.”

“There were Monsieur de Rastignac, Doctor Bianchon, Pere Goriot, Mademoiselle Taillefer——­”