said M. Ginory.
"We have listened to confessions in our offices which are as inviolable
as those of the confessional made to a priest."

And now, after having accused Dantin of lying, believing that he was
acting a comedy, after smiling disdainfully at that common invention--a
vow which one could not break--the perception of a possibility entered
the Magistrate's mind that this man might be sincere. Hitherto he had
closed his heart against sympathy for this man; they had met in the
mutual hostility.

The manner in which Jacques Dantin approached the question, the
resolution with which he spoke, no longer resembled the obstinate
attitude which he had before assumed in this same room.

Reflection, the prison--the cell, without doubt--a frightful and
stifling cell--had done its work. The man who had been excited to the
point of not speaking now wished to tell all.

"Yes," he said, "since nothing has happened to convince you that I am
not lying."

"I am listening to you," said the Magistrate.

Then, in a long, close conference, Jacques Dantin told M. Ginory his
story. He related how, from early youth, he and Rovere had been close
friends; of the warm affection which had always existed between them; of
the shams and deceptions of which he had been guilty; of the bitterness
of his ruined life; of an existence which ought to have been beautiful,
and which, so useless, the life of a _viveur_, had almost made
him--why?--how?--through need of money and a lack of moral sense--almost
descend to crime.

This Rovere, whom he was accused of killing, he loved, and, to tell the
truth, in that strange and troublous existence which he had lived,
Rovere had been the only true friend whom he had known. Rovere, a sort
of pessimistic philosopher, a recluse, lycanthropic, after a life spent
in feasting, having surfeited himself with pleasure, recognized also in
his last years that disinterested affection is rare in this world, and
his savage misanthropy softened before Jacques Dantin's warm
friendship.

"I continued to search for, in what is called pleasure and what as one's
hair whitens becomes vice; in play; in the uproar of Paris,
forgetfulness of life, of the dull life of a man growing old, alone,
without home or family, an old, stupid fellow, whom the young people
look at with hate and say to each other: 'Why is he still here?' Rovere,
more and more, felt the need of withdrawing into solitude, thinking over
his adventurous life