“All right, we will go there,” said he.  “But as you surrender, allow me to fit you with bracelets.  I am afraid of your claws.”

And he took the handcuffs out of his pocket.

Jacques Collin held out his hands, and Bibi-Lupin snapped on the manacles.

“Well, now, since you are feeling so good,” said he, “tell me how you got out of the Conciergerie?”

“By the way you came; down the turret stairs.”

“Then have you taught the gendarmes some new trick?”

“No, Monsieur de Granville let me out on parole.”

“You are gammoning me?”

“You will see.  Perhaps it will be your turn to wear the bracelets.”

Just then Corentin was saying to Monsieur de Granville: 

“Well, monsieur, it is just an hour since our man set out; are you not afraid that he may have fooled you?  He is on the road to Spain perhaps by this time, and we shall not find him there, for Spain is a whimsical kind of country.”

“Either I know nothing of men, or he will come back; he is bound by every interest; he has more to look for at my hands than he has to give.”

Bibi-Lupin walked in.

“Monsieur le Comte,” said he, “I have good news for you.  Jacques Collin, who had escaped, has been recaptured.”

“And this,” said Jacques Collin, addressing Monsieur de Granville, “is the way you keep your word!—­Ask your double-faced agent where he took me.”

“Where?” said the public prosecutor.

“Close to the Court, in the vaulted passage,” said Bibi-Lupin.

“Take your irons off the man,” said Monsieur de Granville sternly.  “And remember that you are to leave him free till further orders.—­Go!  —­You have a way of moving and acting as if you alone were law and police in one.”

The public prosecutor turned his back on Bibi-Lupin, who became deadly pale, especially at a look from Jacques Collin, in which he read disaster.

“I have not been out of this room.  I expected you back, and you cannot doubt that I have kept my word, as you kept yours,” said Monsieur de Granville to the convict.

“For a moment I did doubt you, sir, and in my place perhaps you would have thought as I did, but on reflection I saw that I was unjust.  I bring you more than you can give me; you had no interest in betraying me.”

The magistrate flashed a look at Corentin.  This glance, which could not escape Trompe-la-Mort, who was watching Monsieur de Granville, directed his attention to the strange little old man sitting in an armchair in a corner.  Warned at once by the swift and anxious instinct that scents the presence of an enemy, Collin examined this figure; he saw at a glance that the eyes were not so old as the costume would suggest, and he detected a disguise.  In one second Jacques Collin was revenged on Corentin for the rapid insight with which Corentin had unmasked him at Peyrade’s.