or to
the Pope. At one blow you alienate one hundred and sixty Deputies and
forty Senators of the Right on the very eve of a motion to discuss the
question of religious pacification; you embroil me with my friends of
to-day, with my friends of to-morrow. Was it to find out if you were in
the same dilemma as des Aubels that you seized the love-letters of
young Maurice d'Esparvieu? I can put your mind at rest on that point.
You are, and all Paris knows it. But it is not to avenge your personal
affronts that you are on the Bench."

"Monsieur le Garde des Sceaux," murmured the Judge, nearly apoplectic
and in a choked voice. "I am an honest man."

"You are a fool ... and a provincial. Listen to me; if Maurice
d'Esparvieu and Mademoiselle Bouchotte are not released within half an
hour I will crush you like a piece of glass. Be off!"

Monsieur Rene d'Esparvieu went himself to fetch his son from the
Conciergerie and took him back to the old house in the Rue Garanciere.
The return was triumphant. The news had been disseminated that Maurice
had with generous imprudence interested himself in an attempt to restore
the monarchy, and that Judge Salneuve, the infamous freemason, the tool
of Combes and Andre, had tried to compromise the young man by making him
out to be an accomplice of a band of criminals.

That was what Abbe Patouille seemed to think, and he answered for
Maurice as for himself. It was known, moreover, that breaking with his
father, who had rallied to the support of the Republic, young
d'Esparvieu was on the high road to becoming an out-and-out Royalist.
The people who had an inside knowledge of things saw in his arrest the
vengeance of the Jews. Was not Maurice a notorious anti-Semite? Catholic
youths went forth to hurl imprecations at Judge Salneuve under the
windows of his residence in the Rue Guenegaud, opposite the Mint.

On the Boulevard du Palais a band of students presented Maurice with a
branch of palm. Maurice made a charming reply.

Maurice was overcome with emotion when he beheld the old house in which
his childhood had been spent, and fell weeping into his mother's arms.

It was a great day, unhappily marred by one painful incident. Monsieur
Sariette, who had lost his reason as a consequence of the shocking
events that had taken place in the Rue de Courcelles, had suddenly
become violent. He had shut himself up in the library, and there he had
remained for twenty-four hours, uttering the most horri