What a duel is that between justice and arbitrary wills on one side and the hulks and cunning on the other!  The hulks—­symbolical of that daring which throws off calculation and reflection, which avails itself of any means, which has none of the hyprocrisy of high-handed justice, but is the hideous outcome of the starving stomach—­the swift and bloodthirsty pretext of hunger.  Is it not attack as against self-protection, theft as against property?  The terrible quarrel between the social state and the natural man, fought out on the narrowest possible ground!  In short, it is a terrible and vivid image of those compromises, hostile to social interests, which the representatives of authority, when they lack power, submit to with the fiercest rebels.

When Monsieur Camusot was announced, the public prosecutor signed that he should be admitted.  Monsieur de Granville had foreseen this visit, and wished to come to an understanding with the examining judge as to how to wind up this business of Lucien’s death.  The end could no longer be that on which he had decided the day before in agreement with Camusot, before the suicide of the hapless poet.

“Sit down, Monsieur Camusot,” said Monsieur de Granville, dropping into his armchair.  The public prosecutor, alone with the inferior judge, made no secret of his depressed state.  Camusot looked at Monsieur de Granville and observed his almost livid pallor, and such utter fatigue, such complete prostration, as betrayed greater suffering perhaps than that of the condemned man to whom the clerk had announced the rejection of his appeal.  And yet that announcement, in the forms of justice, is a much as to say, “Prepare to die; your last hour has come.”

“I will return later, Monsieur le Comte,” said Camusot.  “Though business is pressing——­”

“No, stay,” replied the public prosecutor with dignity.  “A magistrate, monsieur, must accept his anxieties and know how to hide them.  I was in fault if you saw any traces of agitation in me——­”

Camusot bowed apologetically.

“God grant you may never know these crucial perplexities of our life.  A man might sink under less!  I have just spent the night with one of my most intimate friends.—­I have but two friends, the Comte Octave de Bauvan and the Comte de Serizy.—­We sat together, Monsieur de Serizy, the Count, and I, from six in the evening till six this morning, taking it in turns to go from the drawing-room to Madame de Serizy’s bedside, fearing each time that we might find her dead or irremediably insane.  Desplein, Bianchon, and Sinard never left the room, and she has two nurses.  The Count worships his wife.  Imagine the night I have spent, between a woman crazy with love and a man crazy with despair.  And a statesman’s despair is not like that of an idiot.  Serizy, as calm as if he were sitting in his place in council, clutched his chair to force himself to show us an unmoved countenance, while sweat