hrough the latter's body just below the heart, but fortunately
without doing vital injury.

"You aimed too well, monsieur," said the baron, "to be avenging only a
paltry quarrel."

And he fainted. Monsieur de Ronquerolles, who believed him to be a dead
man, smiled sardonically as he heard those words.

After a fortnight, during which time the dowager and the vidame gave
him those cares of old age the secret of which is in the hands of long
experience only, the baron began to return to life. But one morning his
grandmother dealt him a crushing blow, by revealing anxieties to which,
in her last days, she was now subjected. She showed him a letter signed
F, in which the history of her grandson's secret espionage was recounted
step by step. The letter accused Monsieur de Maulincour of actions that
were unworthy of a man of honor. He had, it said, placed an old woman
at the stand of hackney-coaches in the rue de Menars; an old spy, who
pretended to sell water from her cask to the coachmen, but who was
really there to watch the actions of Madame Jules Desmarets. He had
spied upon the daily life of a most inoffensive man, in order to detect
his secrets,--secrets on which depended the lives of three persons. He
had brought upon himself a relentless struggle, in which, although he
had escaped with life three times, he must inevitably succumb, because
his death had been sworn and would be compassed if all human means were
employed upon it. Monsieur de Maulincour could no longer escape his fate
by even promising to respect the mysterious life of these three persons,
because it was impossible to believe the word of a gentleman who had
fallen to the level of a police-spy; and for what reason? Merely to
trouble the respectable life of an innocent woman and a harmless old
man.

The letter itself was nothing to Auguste in comparison to the tender
reproaches of his grandmother. To lack respect to a woman! to spy upon
her actions without a right to do so! Ought a man ever to spy upon
a woman whom he loved?--in short, she poured out a torrent of those
excellent reasons which prove nothing; and they put the young baron,
for the first time in his life, into one of those great human furies in
which are born, and from which issue the most vital actions of a man's
life.

"Since it is war to the knife," he said in conclusion, "I shall kill my
enemy by any means that I can lay hold of."

The vidame went immediately, at Auguste's request,