ny
questions. That affair brought him clients, and now he is very busy; but
in my line a practice brings--"

"It is only the righteous that suffer here below," said La Cibot. "Well,
M. Poulain, good-day and thank you."

And herewith begins the tragedy, or, if you like to have it so,
a terrible comedy--the death of an old bachelor delivered over by
circumstances too strong for him to the rapacity and greed that gathered
about his bed. And other forces came to the support of rapacity and
greed; there was the picture collector's mania, that most intense of all
passions; there was the cupidity of the Sieur Fraisier, whom you shall
presently behold in his den, a sight to make you shudder; and lastly,
there was the Auvergnat thirsting for money, ready for anything--even
for a crime--that should bring him the capital he wanted. The first part
of the story serves in some sort as a prelude to this comedy in which
all the actors who have hitherto occupied the stage will reappear.

The degradation of a word is one of those curious freaks of manners
upon which whole volumes of explanation might be written. Write to an
attorney and address him as "Lawyer So-and-so," and you insult him as
surely as you would insult a wholesale colonial produce merchant by
addressing your letter to "Mr. So-and-so, Grocer." There are plenty
of men of the world who ought to be aware, since the knowledge of such
subtle distinctions is their province, that you cannot insult a French
writer more cruelly than by calling him _un homme de lettres_--a
literary man. The word _monsieur_ is a capital example of the life and
death of words. Abbreviated from monseigneur, once so considerable a
title, and even now, in the form of _sire_, reserved for emperors and
kings, it is bestowed indifferently upon all and sundry; while the
twin-word _messire_, which is nothing but its double and equivalent, if
by any chance it slips into a certificate of burial, produces an outcry
in the Republican papers.

Magistrates, councillors, jurisconsults, judges, barristers, officers
for the crown, bailiffs, attorneys, clerks of the court, procurators,
solicitors, and agents of various kinds, represent or misrepresent
Justice. The "lawyer" and the bailiff's men (commonly called "the
brokers") are the two lowest rungs of the ladder. Now, the bailiff's man
is an outsider, an adventitious minister of justice, appearing to
see that judgment is executed; he is, in fact, a kind of infer