t. You will come as the examining judge, since
matters do not seem to you very clear. Deuce take it! It is as necessary
to cross-question the Marquise as it is to examine the Marquis."

"You are right," said the lawyer. "It is quite possible that it is she
who is mad. I will go."

"I will call for you. Write down in your engagement book: 'To-morrow
evening at nine, Madame d'Espard.'--Good!" said Bianchon, seeing his
uncle make a note of the engagement.

Next evening at nine Bianchon mounted his uncle's dusty staircase, and
found him at work on the statement of some complicated judgment. The
coat Lavienne had ordered of the tailor had not been sent, so Popinot
put on his old stained coat, and was the Popinot unadorned whose
appearance made those laugh who did not know the secrets of his
private life. Bianchon, however, obtained permission to pull his cravat
straight, and to button his coat, and he hid the stains by crossing the
breast of it with the right side over the left, and so displaying the
new front of the cloth. But in a minute the judge rucked the coat
up over his chest by the way in which he stuffed his hands into his
pockets, obeying an irresistible habit. Thus the coat, deeply wrinkled
both in front and behind, made a sort of hump in the middle of the back,
leaving a gap between the waistcoat and trousers through which his shirt
showed. Bianchon, to his sorrow, only discovered this crowning absurdity
at the moment when his uncle entered the Marquise's room.

A brief sketch of the person and the career of the lady in whose
presence the doctor and the judge now found themselves is necessary for
an understanding of her interview with Popinot.

Madame d'Espard had, for the last seven years, been very much the
fashion in Paris, where Fashion can raise and drop by turns various
personages who, now great and now small, that is to say, in view or
forgotten, are at last quite intolerable--as discarded ministers are,
and every kind of decayed sovereignty. These flatterers of the past,
odious with their stale pretensions, know everything, speak ill of
everything, and, like ruined profligates, are friends with all the
world. Since her husband had separated from her in 1815, Madame d'Espard
must have married in the beginning of 1812. Her children, therefore,
were aged respectively fifteen and thirteen. By what luck was the mother
of a family, about three-and-thirty years of age, still the fashion?

Though Fashio