“D.  DE MAUFRIGNEUSE. 
“L.  DE SERIZY.

“P.  S.—­Burn this note.”

Camusot understood at once that he had blundered preposterously in laying snares for Lucien, and he began by obeying the two fine ladies —­he lighted a taper, and burned the letter written by the Duchess.  The man bowed respectfully.

“Then Madame de Serizy is coming here?” asked Camusot.

“The carriage is being brought round.”

At this moment Coquart came in to tell Monsieur Camusot that the public prosecutor expected him.

Oppressed by the blunder he had committed, in view of his ambitions, though to the better ends of justice, the lawyer, in whom seven years’ experience had perfected the sharpness that comes to a man who in his practice has had to measure his wits against the grisettes of Paris, was anxious to have some shield against the resentment of two women of fashion.  The taper in which he had burned the note was still alight, and he used it to seal up the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse’s notes to Lucien—­about thirty in all—­and Madame de Serizy’s somewhat voluminous correspondence.

Then he waited on the public prosecutor.

The Palais de Justice is a perplexing maze of buildings piled one above another, some fine and dignified, others very mean, the whole disfigured by its lack of unity.  The Salle des Pas-Perdus is the largest known hall, but its nakedness is hideous, and distresses the eye.  This vast Cathedral of the Law crushes the Supreme Court.  The Galerie Marchande ends in two drain-like passages.  From this corridor there is a double staircase, a little larger than that of the Criminal Courts, and under it a large double door.  The stairs lead down to one of the Assize Courts, and the doors open into another.  In some years the number of crimes committed in the circuit of the Seine is great enough to necessitate the sitting of two Benches.

Close by are the public prosecutor’s offices, the attorney’s room and library, the chambers of the attorney-general, and those of the public prosecutor’s deputies.  All these purlieus, to use a generic term, communicate by narrow spiral stairs and the dark passages, which are a disgrace to the architecture not of Paris only, but of all France.  The interior arrangement of the sovereign court of justice outdoes our prisons in all that is most hideous.  The writer describing our manners and customs would shrink from the necessity of depicting the squalid corridor of about a metre in width, in which the witnesses wait in the Superior Criminal Court.  As to the stove which warms the court itself, it would disgrace a cafe on the Boulevard Mont-Parnasse.

The public prosecutor’s private room forms part of an octagon wing flanking the Galerie Marchande, built out recently in regard to the age of the structure, over the prison yard, outside the women’s quarters.  All this part of the Palais is overshadowed by the lofty and noble edifice of the Sainte-Chapelle.  And all is solemn and silent.