ovinces.
He was accustomed to taking broad views of things; he could do rapidly
what the President and Blondet could only do after much thinking, and
very often solved knotty points for them. In delicate conjunctures the
President and Vice-President took counsel with their junior, confided
thorny questions to him, and never failed to wonder at the readiness
with which he brought back a task in which old Blondet found nothing
to criticise. Michu was sure of the influence of the most crabbed
aristocrats, and he was young and rich; he lived, therefore, above the
level of departmental intrigues and pettinesses. He was an indispensable
man at picnics, he frisked with young ladies and paid court to their
mothers, he danced at balls, he gambled like a capitalist. In short, he
played his part of young lawyer of fashion to admiration; without, at
the same time, compromising his dignity, which he knew how to assert
at the right moment like a man of spirit. He won golden opinions by
the manner in which he threw himself into provincial ways, without
criticising them; and for these reasons, every one endeavored to make
his time of exile endurable.

The public prosecutor was a lawyer of the highest ability; he had taken
the plunge into political life, and was one of the most distinguished
speakers on the ministerialist benches. The President stood in awe of
him; if he had not been away in Paris at the time, no steps would
have been taken against Victurnien; his dexterity, his experience
of business, would have prevented the whole affair. At that moment,
however, he was in the Chamber of Deputies, and the President and
du Croisier had taken advantage of his absence to weave their plot,
calculating, with a certain ingenuity, that if once the law stepped in,
and the matter was noised abroad, things would have gone too far to be
remedied.

As a matter of fact, no staff of prosecuting counsel in any Tribunal,
at that particular time, would have taken up a charge of forgery against
the eldest son of one of the noblest houses in France without going into
the case at great length, and a special reference, in all probability,
to the Attorney-General. In such a case as this, the authorities and the
Government would have tried endless ways of compromising and hushing
up an affair which might send an imprudent young man to the hulks. They
would very likely have done the same for a Liberal family in a prominent
position, so long as the Liberals