and trouble changed into indignant conviction.  It was not possible!  He had been deceived as to Le Merquier.  There was surely some bold slander in it, such as so easily spreads in Paris—­or perhaps it was one of those ferocious snares among which he had stumbled for six months.  No, this stern conscience, so well known in Parliament and the courts, this cold and austere personage, could not be treated like those great swollen pashas with loosened waist-belts and floating sleeves open to conceal the bags of gold.  He would only expose himself to a scandalous refusal, to the legitimate revolt of outraged honour, if he attempted such means of corruption.

The Nabob told himself all this, as he sat on the oak bench which ran round the room, a bench polished with serge dresses and the rough cloth of cassocks.  In spite of the early hour several persons were waiting there with him.  A Dominican, ascetic and serene, walking up and down with great strides; two sisters of charity, buried under their caps, counting long rosaries which measured their time of waiting; priests from Lyons, recognisable by the shape of their hats; others reserved and severe in air, sitting at the great ebony table which filled the middle of the room, and turning over some of those pious journals printed at Fouvieres, just above Lyons, the Echo of Purgatory, the Rose-bush of Mary, which give as a present to all yearly subscribers pontifical indulgences and remissions of future sins.  Some muttered words, a stifled cough, the light whispered prayers of the sisters, recalled to Jansoulet the distant and confused sensation of the hours of waiting in the corner of his village church round the confessional on the eves of the great festivals of the Church.

At last his turn came, and if a doubt as to M. Le Merquier had remained, he doubted no longer when he saw this great office, simple and severe, yet a little more ornate than the waiting-room, a fitting frame for the austerity of the lawyer’s principles, and for his thin form, tall, stooping, narrow-shouldered, squeezed into a black coat too short in the sleeves, from which protruded two black fists, broad and flat, two sticks of Indian ink with hieroglyphs of great veins.  The clerical deputy had, with the leaden hue of a Lyonnese grown mouldy between his two rivers, a certain life of expression which he owed to his double look—­sometimes sparkling, but impenetrable behind the glass of his spectacles; more often, vivid, mistrustful, and dark, above these same glasses, surrounded by the shadow which a lifted eye and a stooping head gives the eyebrow.

After a greeting almost cordial in comparison with the cold bow which the two colleagues exchanged at the Chamber, an “I was expecting you” in which perhaps an intention showed itself, the lawyer pointed the Nabob into a seat near his desk, told the smug domestic in black not to come till he was summoned, arranged a few papers, after which, sinking into his arm-chair with the attitude of a man ready to listen, who becomes all ears, his legs crossed, he rested his chin on his hand, with his eyes fixed on a great rep curtain falling to the ground in front of him.