On seeing this man, the porters paused for a moment, for he looked like one of those stone images, kneeling to all eternity on a mediaeval tomb, the work of some stone-carver’s genius.  The sham priest, with eyes as bright as a tiger’s, but stiffened into supernatural rigidity, so impressed the men that they gently bid him rise.

“Why?” he asked mildly.  The audacious Trompe-la-Mort was as meek as a child.

The governor pointed him out to Monsieur de Chargeboeuf; and he, respecting such grief, and believing that Jacques Collin was indeed the priest he called himself, explained the orders given by Monsieur de Granville with regard to the funeral service and arrangements, showing that it was absolutely necessary that the body should be transferred to Lucien’s lodgings, Quai Malaquais, where the priests were waiting to watch by it for the rest of the night.

“It is worthy of that gentleman’s well-known magnanimity,” said Jacques Collin sadly.  “Tell him, monsieur, that he may rely on my gratitude.  Yes, I am in a position to do him great service.  Do not forget these words; they are of the utmost importance to him.

“Oh, monsieur! strange changes come over a man’s spirit when for seven hours he has wept over such a son as he——­And I shall see him no more!”

After gazing once more at Lucien with an expression of a mother bereft of her child’s remains, Jacques Collin sank in a heap.  As he saw Lucien’s body carried away, he uttered a groan that made the men hurry off.  The public prosecutor’s private secretary and the governor of the prison had already made their escape from the scene.

What had become of that iron spirit; of the decision which was a match in swiftness for the eye; of the nature in which thought and action flashed forth together like one flame; of the sinews hardened by three spells of labor on the hulks, and by three escapes, the muscles which had acquired the metallic temper of a savage’s limbs?  Iron will yield to a certain amount of hammering or persistent pressure; its impenetrable molecules, purified and made homogeneous by man, may become disintegrated, and without being in a state of fusion the metal had lost its power of resistance.  Blacksmiths, locksmiths, tool-makers sometimes express this state by saying the iron is retting, appropriating a word applied exclusively to hemp, which is reduced to pulp and fibre by maceration.  Well, the human soul, or, if you will, the threefold powers of body, heart, and intellect, under certain repeated shocks, get into such a condition as fibrous iron.  They too are disintegrated.  Science and law and the public seek a thousand causes for the terrible catastrophes on railways caused by the rupture of an iron rail, that of Bellevue being a famous instance; but no one has asked the evidence of real experts in such matters, the blacksmiths, who all say the same thing, “The iron was stringy!” The danger cannot be foreseen.  Metal that has gone soft, and metal that has preserved its tenacity, both look exactly alike.