On seeing the body, he threw himself upon it, seizing it in a desperate embrace with a passion and impulse that made these spectators shudder.

“There,” said the doctor to Monsieur Gault, “that is an instance of what I was telling you.  You see that man clutching the body, and you do not know what a corpse is; it is stone——­”

“Leave me alone!” said Jacques Collin in a smothered voice; “I have not long to look at him.  They will take him away to——­”

He paused at the word “bury him.”

“You will allow me to have some relic of my dear boy!  Will you be so kind as to cut off a lock of his hair for me, monsieur,” he said to the doctor, “for I cannot——­”

“He was certainly his son,” said Lebrun.

“Do you think so?” replied the governor in a meaning tone, which made the doctor thoughtful for a few minutes.

The governor gave orders that the prisoner should be left in this cell, and that some locks of hair should be cut for the self-styled father before the body should be removed.

At half-past five in the month of May it is easy to read a letter in the Conciergerie in spite of the iron bars and the close wire trellis that guard the windows.  So Jacques Collin read the dreadful letter while he still held Lucien’s hand.

The man is not known who can hold a lump of ice for ten minutes tightly clutched in the hollow of his hand.  The cold penetrates to the very life-springs with mortal rapidity.  But the effect of that cruel chill, acting like a poison, is as nothing to that which strikes to the soul from the cold, rigid hand of the dead thus held.  Thus Death speaks to Life; it tells many dark secrets which kill many feelings; for in matters of feeling is not change death?

As we read through once more, with Jacques Collin, Lucien’s last letter, it will strike us as being what it was to this man—­a cup of poison:—­

“To the Abbe Carlos Herrera.

“MY DEAR ABBE,—­I have had only benefits from you, and I have betrayed you.  This involuntary ingratitude is killing me, and when you read these lines I shall have ceased to exist.  You are not here now to save me.

“You had given me full liberty, if I should find it advantageous, to destroy you by flinging you on the ground like a cigar-end; but I have ruined you by a blunder.  To escape from a difficulty, deluded by a clever question from the examining judge, your son by adoption and grace went over to the side of those who aim at killing you at any cost, and insist on proving an identity, which I know to be impossible, between you and a French villain.  All is said.

“Between a man of your calibre and me—­me of whom you tried to make a greater man than I am capable of being—­no foolish sentiment can come at the moment of final parting.  You hoped to make me powerful and famous, and you have thrown me into the gulf of suicide, that is