“And I was fool enough to waste all that cleverness for a thousand crowns!”

“No, for a woman,” replied Jacques Collin.  “I tell you, they deprive us of all our wits,” and Jacques Collin eyed Theodore with a flashing glance of contempt.

“But you were not there!” said the Corsican; “I was all alone——­”

“And do you love the slut?” asked Jacques Collin, feeling that the reproach was a just one.

“Oh!  I want to live, but it is for you now rather than for her.”

“Be quite easy, I am not called Trompe-la-Mort for nothing.  I undertake the case.”

“What! life?” cried the lad, lifting his swaddled hands towards the damp vault of the cell.

“My little Madeleine, prepare to be lagged for life (penal servitude),” replied Jacques Collin.  “You can expect no less; they won’t crown you with roses like a fatted ox.  When they first set us down for Rochefort, it was because they wanted to be rid of us!  But if I can get you ticketed for Toulon, you can get out and come back to Pantin (Paris), where I will find you a tidy way of living.”

A sigh such as had rarely been heard under that inexorable roof struck the stones, which sent back the sound that has no fellow in music, to the ear of the astounded Bibi-Lupin.

“It is the effect of the absolution I promised him in return for his revelations,” said Jacques Collin to the gendarme.  “These Corsicans, monsieur, are full of faith!  But he is as innocent as the Immaculate Babe, and I mean to try to save him.”

“God bless you, Monsieur l’Abbe!” said Theodore in French.

Trompe-la-Mort, more Carlos Herrera, more the canon than ever, left the condemned cell, rushed back to the hall, and appeared before Monsieur Gault in affected horror.

“Indeed, sir, the young man is innocent; he has told me who the guilty person is!  He was ready to die for a false point of honor—­he is a Corsican!  Go and beg the public prosecutor to grant me five minutes’ interview.  Monsieur de Granville cannot refuse to listen at once to a Spanish priest who is suffering so cruelly from the blunders of the French police.”

“I will go,” said Monsieur Gault, to the extreme astonishment of all the witnesses of this extraordinary scene.

“And meanwhile,” said Jacques, “send me back to the prison-yard where I may finish the conversion of a criminal whose heart I have touched already—­they have hearts, these people!”

This speech produced a sensation in all who heard it.  The gendarmes, the registry clerk, Sanson, the warders, the executioner’s assistant —­all awaiting orders to go and get the scaffold ready—­to rig up the machine, in prison slang—­all these people, usually so indifferent, were agitated by very natural curiosity.

Just then the rattle of a carriage with high-stepping horses was heard; it stopped very suggestively at the gate of the Conciergerie on the quay.  The door was opened, and the step let down in such haste, that every one supposed that some great personage had arrived.  Presently a lady waving a sheet of blue paper came forward to the outer gate of the prison, followed by a footman and a chasseur.  Dressed very handsomely, and all in black, with a veil over her bonnet, she was wiping her eyes with a floridly embroidered handkerchief.