To get rid of Peyrade, he was simply accused of connivance in favoring smuggling and sharing certain profits with the great merchants.  Such an indignity was hard on a man who had earned the Marshal’s baton of the Police Department by the great services he had done.  This man, who had grown old in active business, knew all the secrets of every Government since 1775, when he had entered the service.  The Emperor, who believed himself powerful enough to create men for his own uses, paid no heed to the representations subsequently laid before him in favor of a man who was reckoned as one of the most trustworthy, most capable, and most acute of the unknown genii whose task it is to watch over the safety of a State.  He thought he could put Contenson in Peyrade’s place; but Contenson was at that time employed by Corentin for his own benefit.

Peyrade felt the blow all the more keenly because, being greedy and a libertine, he had found himself, with regard to women, in the position of a pastry-cook who loves sweetmeats.  His habits of vice had become to him a second nature; he could not live without a good dinner, without gambling, in short, without the life of an unpretentious fine gentleman, in which men of powerful faculties so generally indulge when they have allowed excessive dissipation to become a necessity.  Hitherto, he had lived in style without ever being expected to entertain; and living well, for no one ever looked for a return from him, or from his friend Corentin.  He was cynically witty, and he liked his profession; he was a philosopher.  And besides, a spy, whatever grade he may hold in the machinery of the police, can no more return to a profession regarded as honorable or liberal, than a prisoner from the hulks can.  Once branded, once matriculated, spies and convicts, like deacons, have assumed an indelible character.  There are beings on whom social conditions impose an inevitable fate.

Peyrade, for his further woe, was very fond of a pretty little girl whom he knew to be his own child by a celebrated actress to whom he had done a signal service, and who, for three months, had been grateful to him.  Peyrade, who had sent for his child from Antwerp, now found himself without employment in Paris and with no means beyond a pension of twelve hundred francs a year allowed him by the Police Department as Lenoir’s old disciple.  He took lodgings in the Rue des Moineaux on the fourth floor, five little rooms, at a rent of two hundred and fifty francs.

If any man should be aware of the uses and sweets of friendship, is it not the moral leper known to the world as a spy, to the mob as a mouchard, to the department as an “agent”?  Peyrade and Corentin were such friends as Orestes and Pylades.  Peyrade had trained Corentin as Vien trained David; but the pupil soon surpassed his master.  They had carried out more than one undertaking together.  Peyrade, happy at having discerned Corentin’s superior abilities, had started him in his career by preparing a success for him.  He obliged his disciple to make use of a mistress who had scorned him as a bait to catch a man (see The Chouans).  And Corentin at that time was hardly five-and-twenty.