letters worthy to compare with Mirabeau’s to Sophie, but more literary, more elaborate, for Lucien’s letters had been dictated by the most powerful of passions—­Vanity.  Having the most bewitching of duchesses for his mistress, and seeing her commit any folly for him—­secret follies, of course—­had turned Lucien’s head with happiness.  The lover’s pride had inspired the poet.  And the Duchess had treasured these touching letters, as some old men keep indecent prints, for the sake of their extravagant praise of all that was least duchess-like in her nature.

“And he died in a squalid prison!” cried she to herself, putting the letters away in a panic when she heard her maid knocking gently at her door.

“Madame Camusot,” said the woman, “on business of the greatest importance to you, Madame la Duchesse.”

Diane sprang to her feet in terror.

“Oh!” cried she, looking at Amelie, who had assumed a duly condoling air, “I guess it all—­my letters!  It is about my letters.  Oh, my letters, my letters!”

She sank on to a couch.  She remembered now how, in the extravagance of her passion, she had answered Lucien in the same vein, had lauded the man’s poetry as he has sung the charms of the woman, and in what a strain!

“Alas, yes, madame, I have come to save what is dearer to you than life—­your honor.  Compose yourself and get dressed, we must go to the Duchesse de Grandlieu; happily for you, you are not the only person compromised.”

“But at the Palais, yesterday, Leontine burned, I am told, all the letters found at poor Lucien’s.”

“But, madame, behind Lucien there was Jacques Collin!” cried the magistrate’s wife.  “You always forget that horrible companionship which beyond question led to that charming and lamented young man’s end.  That Machiavelli of the galleys never loses his head!  Monsieur Camusot is convinced that the wretch has in some safe hiding-place all the most compromising letters written by you ladies to his——­”

“His friend,” the Duchess hastily put in.  “You are right, my child.  We must hold council at the Grandlieus’.  We are all concerned in this matter, and Serizy happily will lend us his aid.”

Extreme peril—­as we have observed in the scenes in the Conciergerie —­has a hold over the soul not less terrible than that of powerful reagents over the body.  It is a mental Voltaic battery.  The day, perhaps, is not far off when the process shall be discovered by which feeling is chemically converted into a fluid not unlike the electric fluid.

The phenomena were the same in the convict and the Duchess.  This crushed, half-dying woman, who had not slept, who was so particular over her dressing, had recovered the strength of a lioness at bay, and the presence of mind of a general under fire.  Diane chose her gown and got through her dressing with the alacrity of a grisette who is her own waiting-woman.  It was so astounding, that the lady’s-maid stood