of a man whose plans are not yet decided.
"I'll go to the mayor's office of your arrondissement, and get Olympe's
register of birth, and put up the banns. The marriage must take place a
week from Saturday."

"How he goes it, the rascal!" cried the admiring Madame Cardinal,
pushing her formidable son-in-law by the shoulder.

As he went downstairs Cerizet was surprised to see, through one of the
small round windows, an old man, evidently du Portail, walking in the
garden with a very important member of the government, Comte Martial de
la Roche-Hugon. He stopped in the courtyard when he reached it, as if
to examine the old house, built in the reign of Louis XIV., the yellow
walls of which, though of freestone, were bent like the elderly beggar
they contained. Then he looked at the workshops, and counted the
workmen. The house was otherwise as silent as a cloister. Being observed
himself, Cerizet departed, thinking over in his mind the various
difficulties that might arise in extracting the sum hidden beneath the
dying man.

"Carry off all that gold at night?" he said to himself; "why, those
porters will be on the watch, and twenty persons might see us! It is
hard work to carry even twenty-five thousand francs of gold on one's
person."

Societies have two goals of perfection; the first is a state of
civilization in which morality equally infused and pervasive does not
admit even the idea of crime; the Jesuits reached that point, formerly
presented by the primitive Church. The second is the state of another
civilization in which the supervision of citizens over one another makes
crime impossible. The end which modern society has placed before itself
is the latter; namely, that in which a crime presents such difficulties
that a man must abandon all reasoning in order to commit it. In fact,
iniquities which the law cannot reach are not left actually unpunished,
for social judgment is even more severe than that of courts. If a
man like Minoret, the post-master at Nemours [see "Ursule Mirouet"]
suppresses a will and no one witnesses the act, the crime is traced home
to him by the watchfulness of virtue as surely as a robbery is followed
up by the detective police. No wrong-doing passes actually unperceived;
and wherever a lesion in rectitude takes place the scar remains. Things
can be no more made to disappear than men; so carefully, in Paris
especially, are articles and objects ticketed and numbered, houses
watched, street