And he sat tapping the edge of his table with the ivory paper-knife, while Coquart copied Esther’s letter.

How whimsical is the action of our faculties!  Camusot conceived of every crime as possible, and overlooked the only one that the prisoner had now committed—­the forgery of the will for Lucien’s advantage.  Let those whose envy vents itself on magistrates think for a moment of their life spent in perpetual suspicion, of the torments these men must inflict on their minds, for civil cases are not less tortuous than criminal examinations, and it will occur to them perhaps that the priest and the lawyer wear an equally heavy coat of mail, equally furnished with spikes in the lining.  However, every profession has its hair shirt and its Chinese puzzles.

It was about two o’clock when Monsieur Camusot saw Lucien de Rubempre come in, pale, worn, his eyes red and swollen, in short, in a state of dejection which enabled the magistrate to compare nature with art, the really dying man with the stage performance.  His walk from the Conciergerie to the judge’s chambers, between two gendarmes, and preceded by the usher, had put the crowning touch to Lucien’s despair.  It is the poet’s nature to prefer execution to condemnation.

As he saw this being, so completely bereft of the moral courage which is the essence of a judge, and which the last prisoner had so strongly manifested, Monsieur Camusot disdained the easy victory; and this scorn enabled him to strike a decisive blow, since it left him, on the ground, that horrible clearness of mind which the marksman feels when he is firing at a puppet.

“Collect yourself, Monsieur de Rubempre; you are in the presence of a magistrate who is eager to repair the mischief done involuntarily by the law when a man is taken into custody on suspicion that has no foundation.  I believe you to be innocent, and you will soon be at liberty.—­Here is the evidence of your innocence; it is a letter kept for you during your absence by your porter’s wife; she has just brought it here.  In the commotion caused by the visitation of justice and the news of your arrest at Fontainebleau, the woman forgot the letter which was written by Mademoiselle Esther Gobseck.—­Read it!”

Lucien took the letter, read it, and melted into tears.  He sobbed, and could not say a single word.  At the end of a quarter of an hour, during which Lucien with great difficulty recovered his self-command, the clerk laid before him the copy of the letter and begged him to sign a footnote certifying that the copy was faithful to the original, and might be used in its stead “on all occasions in the course of this preliminary inquiry,” giving him the option of comparing the two; but Lucien, of course, took Coquart’s word for its accuracy.