hiavellian
motive; but Eve gave him credit for delicate consideration, and he
allowed her to thank him for it. The little attention, at such a
moment, from so hard a man, modified Mme. Sechard's previous opinion of
Petit-Claud.

"I am taking you round by the longest way," he said, "and we shall meet
nobody."

"For the first time in my life, monsieur, I feel that I have no right
to hold up my head before other people; I had a sharp lesson given to me
last night----"

"It will be the first and the last."

"Oh! I certainly shall not stay in the town now----"

"Let me know if your husband consents to the proposals that are all but
definitely offered by the Cointets," said Petit-Claud at the gate of
the prison; "I will come at once with an order for David's release from
Cachan, and in all likelihood he will not go back again to prison."

This suggestion, made on the very threshold of the jail, was a piece of
cunning strategy--a _combinazione_, as the Italians call an indefinable
mixture of treachery and truth, a cunningly planned fraud which does not
break the letter of the law, or a piece of deft trickery for which there
is no legal remedy. St. Bartholomew's for instance, was a political
combination.

Imprisonment for debt, for reasons previously explained, is such a rare
occurrence in the provinces, that there is no house of detention, and
a debtor is perforce imprisoned with the accused, convicted, and
condemned--the three graduated subdivisions of the class generically
styled criminal. David was put for the time being in a cell on the
ground floor from which some prisoner had probably been recently
discharged at the end of his time. Once inscribed on the jailer's
register, with the amount allowed by the law for a prisoner's board for
one month, David confronted a big, stout man, more powerful than the
King himself in a prisoner's eyes; this was the jailer.

An instance of a thin jailer is unknown in the provinces. The place, to
begin with, is almost a sinecure, and a jailer is a kind of innkeeper
who pays no rent and lives very well, while his prisoners fare very ill;
for, like an innkeeper, he gives them rooms according to their payments.
He knew David by name, and what was more, knew about David's father,
and thought that he might venture to let the printer have a good room on
credit for one night; for David was penniless.

The prison of Angouleme was built in the Middle Ages, and has no more
changed than t