e
kingdom sometimes necessitated illegal action in secret, crime began
when these State measures were applied to private cases.

Next day, just as Peyrade was going to his beloved Cafe David, where he
enjoyed watching the bourgeois eat, as an artist watches flowers open, a
gendarme in private clothes spoke to him in the street.

"I was going to fetch you," said he in his ear. "I have orders to take
you to the Prefecture."

Peyrade called a hackney cab, and got in without saying a single word,
followed by the gendarme.

The Prefet treated Peyrade as though he were the lowest warder on
the hulks, walking to and fro in a side path of the garden of the
Prefecture, which at that time was on the Quai des Orfevres.

"It is not without good reason, monsieur, that since 1830 you have been
kept out of office. Do not you know to what risk you expose us, not to
mention yourself?"

The lecture ended in a thunderstroke. The Prefet sternly informed poor
Peyrade that not only would his yearly allowance be cut off, but that
he himself would be narrowly watched. The old man took the shock with an
air of perfect calm. Nothing can be more rigidly expressionless than a
man struck by lightning. Peyrade had lost all his stake in the game. He
had counted on getting an appointment, and he found himself bereft of
everything but the alms bestowed by his friend Corentin.

"I have been the Prefet of Police myself; I think you perfectly right,"
said the old man quietly to the functionary who stood before him in his
judicial majesty, and who answered with a significant shrug.

"But allow me, without any attempt to justify myself, to point out that
you do not know me at all," Peyrade went on, with a keen glance at the
Prefet. "Your language is either too severe to a man who has been the
head of the police in Holland, or not severe enough for a mere spy. But,
Monsieur le Prefet," Peyrade added after a pause, while the other kept
silence, "bear in mind what I now have the honor to telling you: I
have no intention of interfering with your police nor of attempting to
justify myself, but you will presently discover that there is some one
in this business who is being deceived; at this moment it is your humble
servant; by and by you will say, 'It was I.'"

And he bowed to the chief, who sat passive to conceal his amazement.

Peyrade returned home, his legs and arms feeling broken, and full
of cold fury with the Baron. Nobody but that burly banker