lk."

"My God! I cannot go home as I am," said Birotteau. "You who are my
friend, if there are friends,--you in whom I took an interest, who have
dined at my house,--take me somewhere in a carriage, for my wife's sake.
Xandrot, go with me!"

The young notary compassionately put the inert mechanism which bore the
name of Cesar into a street coach, not without great difficulty.

"Xandrot," said the perfumer, in a voice choked with tears,--for the
tears were now falling from his eyes, and loosening the iron band which
bound his brow,--"stop at my shop; go in and speak to Celestin for
me. My friend, tell him it is a matter of life or death, that on no
consideration must he or any one talk about Roguin's flight. Tell
Cesarine to come down to me, and beg her not to say a word to her
mother. We must beware of our best friends, of Pillerault, Ragon,
everybody."

The change in Birotteau's voice startled Crottat, who began to
understand the importance of the warning; he fulfilled the instructions
of the poor man, whom Celestin and Cesarine were horrified to find pale
and half insensible in a corner of the carriage.

"Keep the secret," he said.

"Ah!" said Xandrot to himself, "he is coming to. I thought him lost."

From thence they went, at Cesar's request, to a judge of the commercial
courts. The conference between Crottat and the magistrate lasted long,
and the president of the chamber of notaries was summoned. Cesar was
carried about from place to place, like a bale of goods; he never moved,
and said nothing. Towards seven in the evening Alexandre Crottat took
him home. The thought of appearing before Constance braced his nerves.
The young notary had the charity to go before, and warn Madame Birotteau
that her husband had had a rush of blood to the head.

"His ideas are rather cloudy," he said, with a gesture implying
disturbance of the brain. "Perhaps he should be bled, or leeches
applied."

"No wonder," said Constance, far from dreaming of a disaster; "he did
not take his precautionary medicine at the beginning of the winter, and
for the last two months he has been working like a galley slave,--just
as if his fortune were not made."

The wife and daughter entreated Cesar to go to bed, and they sent for
his old friend Monsieur Haudry. The old man was a physician of
the school of Moliere, a great practitioner and in favor of the
old-fashioned formulas, who dosed his patients neither more nor less
than a quack, cons