Birotteau rose, pale and solemn, and looked at Popinot.

Popinot, horror-struck, cried out, “I will do them for you, if you wish it.”

“UNGRATEFUL!” said his master, who spent his whole remaining strength in hurling the word at Anselme’s brow, as if it were a living mark of infamy.

Birotteau walked to the door, and went out.  Popinot, rousing himself from the sensation which the terrible word produced upon him, rushed down the staircase and into the street, but Birotteau was out of sight.  Cesarine’s lover heard that dreadful charge ringing in his ears, and saw the distorted face of the poor distracted Cesar constantly before him; Popinot was to live henceforth, like Hamlet, with a spectre beside him.

Birotteau wandered about the streets of the neighborhood like a drunken man.  At last he found himself upon the quay, and followed it till he reached Sevres, where he passed the night at an inn, maddened with grief, while his terrified wife dared not send in search of him.  She knew that in such circumstances an alarm, imprudently given, might be fatal to his credit, and the wise Constance sacrificed her own anxiety to her husband’s commercial reputation:  she waited silently through the night, mingling her prayers and terrors.  Was Cesar dead?  Had he left Paris on the scent of some last hope?  The next morning she behaved as though she knew the reasons for his absence; but at five o’clock in the afternoon when Cesar had not returned, she sent for her uncle and begged him to go at once to the Morgue.  During the whole of that day the courageous creature sat behind her counter, her daughter embroidering beside her.  When Pillerault returned, Cesar was with him; on his way back the old man had met him in the Palais-Royal, hesitating before the entrance to a gambling-house.

This was the 14th.  At dinner Cesar could not eat.  His stomach, violently contracted, rejected food.  The evening hours were terrible.  The shaken man went through, for the hundredth time, one of those frightful alternations of hope and despair which, by forcing the soul to run up the scale of joyous emotion and then precipitating it to the last depths of agony, exhaust the vital strength of feeble beings.  Derville, Birotteau’s advocate, rushed into the handsome salon where Madame Cesar was using all her persuasion to retain her husband, who wished to sleep on the fifth floor,—­“that I may not see,” he said, “these monuments of my folly.”

“The suit is won!” cried Derville.

At these words Cesar’s drawn face relaxed; but his joy alarmed Derville and Pillerault.  The women left the room to go and weep by themselves in Cesarine’s chamber.

“Now I can get a loan!” cried Birotteau.

“It would be imprudent,” said Derville; “they have appealed; the court might reverse the judgment; but in a month it would be safe.”

“A month!”