CVI. Le partage.

CVI

The Division.

In that hotel on the rue Saint-Germain-des-Prés which Albert de Morcerf had chosen for his mother and himself, the first floor, composed of a small complete apartment, was let to a very mysterious personage.

This personage was a man whose face the concierge himself had never been able to see, whether he came in or went out; for in winter he buried his chin in one of those red cravats such as well-appointed coachmen wear who wait for their masters at the theatre doors, and in summer he was always blowing his nose precisely at the moment when he might have been perceived passing before the lodge. It must be said that, contrary to all received customs, this inhabitant of the hotel was spied upon by no one, and that the rumor which ran that his incognito concealed a person very highly placed, and *having a long arm*, had caused his mysterious appearances to be respected.

His visits were usually fixed, although sometimes they were advanced or delayed; but almost always, winter or summer, it was toward four o'clock that he took possession of his apartment, in which he never passed the night.

At half-past three, in winter, the fire was lit by the discreet servant who had the care of the small apartment; at half-past three, in summer, ice was brought up by the same servant.

At four o'clock, as we have said, the mysterious personage arrived.

Twenty minutes after him, a carriage stopped before the hotel; a woman dressed in black or dark blue, but always wrapped in a large veil, got out of it, passed like a shadow before the lodge, mounted the staircase without a single step creaking under her light foot.

Never had it happened that she was asked where she was going.

Her face, like that of the unknown, was therefore perfectly strange to the two guardians of the door, those model concierges, the only ones, perhaps, in the immense brotherhood of the capital's porters capable of such discretion.

It goes without saying that she mounted no higher than the first floor. She scratched at a door in a particular way; the door opened, then closed hermetically, and all was said.

To leave the hotel, the same maneuver as to enter it.

The unknown woman went out first, always veiled, and got back into her carriage, which now disappeared at one end of the street, now at the other; then, twenty minutes after, the unknown went out in his turn, buried in his cravat or hidden by his handkerchief, and disappeared likewise.

On the day after the Count of Monte Cristo had gone to pay a visit to Danglars, the day of Valentine's funeral, the mysterious inhabitant entered about ten o'clock in the morning, instead of entering, as usual, about four o'clock in the afternoon.

Almost immediately, and without keeping the usual interval, a hackney carriage arrived, and the veiled lady rapidly mounted the staircase.

The door opened and closed.

But, even before the door was closed, the lady had cried out:

“O Lucien! O my friend!”

So that the concierge, who, without wishing it, had heard this exclamation, knew then for the first time that his lodger was called Lucien; but as he was a model porter, he promised himself not even to tell it to his wife.

“Well, what is it, dear friend?” said he whose trouble or eagerness the veiled lady had revealed the name of; “speak, tell me.

“But what is it?

“Your note this morning has thrown me into terrible perplexity.

“This precipitation, this disorder in your writing; come, reassure me or frighten me completely!

“Lucien, a great event!” said the lady, fixing on Lucien an inquiring glance; “M. Danglars left last night.”

“Gone! M. Danglars gone!

“And where has he gone?”

“I do not know.”

“What! you do not know? Then he is gone never to return?”

“Doubtless!”

“At ten o'clock in the evening, his horses conveyed him to the Charenton barrier; there he found a post-chaise all harnessed; he got into it with his valet de chambre, saying to his coachman that he was going to Fontainebleau.”

“Well, what were you saying then?”

“Wait, my friend. He left me a letter.”

“A letter?”

“Yes; read it.”

And the baroness drew from her pocket an unsealed letter which she presented to Debray.

Debray, before reading it, hesitated an instant, as if he had sought to divine what it contained, or rather as if, whatever it contained, he were decided to take a course beforehand.

At the end of a few seconds his ideas were doubtless settled, for he read.

This is what that note contained which had thrown such great trouble into the heart of Mme Danglars:

“Madame and very faithful wife.”

Without thinking, Debray stopped and looked at the baroness, who blushed to her eyes.

“Read,” said she.

Debray continued:

“When you receive this letter you will have no more husband! Oh! do not take the alarm too warmly, you will have no more husband just as you will have no more daughter, that is to say that I shall be on one of the thirty or forty roads which lead out of France.

“I owe you explanations, and as you are a woman to understand them perfectly, I will give them to you.

“Listen then:

“A reimbursement of five millions came to me this morning, I effected it; another of the same sum followed almost immediately; I put it off till tomorrow: today I leave to avoid that tomorrow which would be too disagreeable for me to bear.

“You understand that, do you not, madame and very precious wife?

“I say:

“You understand, because you know my affairs as well as I do; you know them even better than I, since if it were a question of saying where a good half of my fortune, lately still handsome enough, has passed, I should be incapable of it; while you, on the contrary, I am certain, would acquit yourself of it perfectly.

“For women have instincts of infallible sureness, they explain by an algebra they have invented the marvelous itself. I, who knew only my figures, have known nothing more from the day my figures deceived me.

“Have you sometimes admired the rapidity of my fall, madame?

“Have you been a little dazzled by that incandescent fusion of my ingots?

“I, I confess, saw nothing there but fire; let us hope that you have found a little gold in the ashes.

“It is with this consoling hope that I withdraw, madame and very prudent wife, without my conscience in the least reproaching me for abandoning you; there remain to you friends, the said ashes, and, to crown your happiness, the liberty which I hasten to restore to you.

“However, madame, the moment has come to place in this paragraph a word of intimate explanation. As long as I hoped that you were working for the well-being of our house, for the fortune of our daughter, I philosophically closed my eyes; but as you have made of the house a vast ruin, I will not serve as foundation for the fortune of another.

“I took you rich, but little honored.

“Pardon me for speaking to you with this frankness; but as I speak probably only for us two, I do not see why I should paint my words.

“I increased our fortune, which for more than fifteen years was growing, until the moment when unknown and still unintelligible catastrophes came to grapple with it body to body and overturn it, without there being, I may say, any fault of mine.

“You, madame, you have worked only to increase your own, a thing in which you have succeeded, I am morally convinced.

“I therefore leave you as I took you, rich, but little honorable.

“Adieu.

“I too, from today, am going to work on my own account.

“Believe in all my gratitude for the example you have given me and which I am going to follow.

“*Your very devoted husband*,

“BARON DANGLARS.”

The baroness had followed Debray with her eyes during this long and painful reading; she had seen, despite his well-known power over himself, the young man change color once or twice.

When he had finished, he slowly folded the paper in its creases, and resumed his pensive attitude.

“Well?” asked Mme Danglars with an easily understood anxiety.

“Well, madame?” repeated Debray mechanically.

“What idea does this letter inspire in you?”

“It is very simple, madame; it inspires in me the idea that M. Danglars is gone with suspicions.”

“Doubtless; but is that all you have to tell me?”

“I do not understand,” said Debray with icy coldness.

“He is gone! gone altogether! gone never to return.”

“Oh!” said Debray, “do not believe that, baroness.”

“No, I tell you, he will not return; I know him, he is a man unshakable in all resolutions which emanate from his interest.

“If he had judged me useful for something, he would have taken me with him. He leaves me in Paris, it is that our separation may serve his projects: it is therefore irrevocable and I am free forever,” added Mme Danglars with the same expression of entreaty.

But Debray, instead of answering, left her in that anxious interrogation of glance and thought.

“What!” said she at last, “you do not answer me, sir?”

“But I have only one question to ask you: what do you count on becoming?”

“I was about to ask you,” answered the baroness, her heart palpitating.

“Ah!” said Debray, “it is then advice that you ask of me?”

“Yes, it is advice that I ask of you,” said the baroness, her heart tight.

“Then, if it is advice that you ask of me,” replied the young man coldly, “I advise you to travel.”

“To travel!” murmured Mme Danglars.

“Certainly. As M. Danglars has said, you are rich and perfectly free. An absence from Paris will be absolutely necessary, at least so I believe, after the double scandal of Mlle Eugénie's broken marriage and M. Danglars's disappearance.

“It only matters that everyone should know you abandoned and believe you poor; for no one would pardon the wife of the bankrupt her opulence and her great establishment.

“For the first case, it suffices that you remain only fifteen days in Paris, repeating to everyone that you are abandoned and relating to your best friends, who will go repeat it in the world, how that abandonment took place. Then you will leave your hotel, you will leave your jewels there, you will abandon your dower, and each will extol your disinterestedness and sing your praises.

“Then you will be known as abandoned, and believed poor; for I alone know your financial situation and am ready to render you my accounts as a loyal associate.”

The baroness, pale, prostrate, had listened to this speech with as much fright and despair as Debray had put calm and indifference in pronouncing it.

“Abandoned!” she repeated, “oh! well abandoned... Yes, you are right, sir, and no one will doubt my abandonment.”

These were the only words that this woman, so proud and so violently enamored, could answer to Debray.

“But rich, very rich even,” pursued Debray, drawing from his portfolio and spreading on the table some papers it contained.

Mme Danglars let him do it, wholly occupied in stifling the beatings of her heart and holding back the tears she felt springing to the edge of her eyelids. But at last the sense of dignity prevailed in the baroness; and if she did not succeed in compressing her heart, she at least managed not to shed a tear.

“Madame,” said Debray, “it is about six months since we became associates.

“You furnished a stake of a hundred thousand francs.

“It was in the month of April of this year that our association took place.

“In May, our operations began.

“In May, we gained four hundred fifty thousand francs.

“In June, the profit rose to nine hundred thousand.

“In July, we added seventeen hundred thousand francs; it is, you know, the month of the Spanish bonds.

“In August, we lost, at the beginning of the month, three hundred thousand francs; but on the 15th of the month we had recovered, and at the end we had taken our revenge; for our accounts, struck clear from the day of our association until yesterday when I closed them, give us an asset of two million four hundred thousand francs, that is to say twelve hundred thousand francs for each of us.

“Now,” continued Debray, reckoning in his notebook with the method and tranquillity of a stockbroker, “we find eighty thousand francs for the compound interest of that sum left in my hands.”

“But,” interrupted the baroness, “what do those interests mean, since you never put that money out at interest?”

“I beg your pardon, madame,” said Debray coldly; “I had your powers to put it out, and I used your powers.

“So that is forty thousand francs of interest for your half, plus the hundred thousand francs of first stake, that is to say thirteen hundred forty thousand francs for your share.

“Now, madame,” continued Debray, “I had the precaution to mobilize your money the day before yesterday, not long ago, as you see, and one would have said that I suspected I was shortly to be called upon to render you my accounts. Your money is there, half in bank bills, half in bearer bonds.

“I say there, and it is true: for as I did not judge my house safe enough, as I found notaries not discreet enough, and as properties speak even louder than notaries; as finally you have no right to buy or possess anything outside the conjugal community, I kept all that sum, today your only fortune, in a coffer sealed at the bottom of this wardrobe, and for greater security, I did the masonry myself.

“Now,” continued Debray, opening the wardrobe first, and the chest afterward, “now, madame, here are eight hundred bills of a thousand francs each, which resemble, as you see, a large album bound in iron; I join to them a coupon of rent of twenty-five thousand francs; then for the odd sum, which makes something, I believe, like a hundred ten thousand francs, here is a sight bill on my banker, and as my banker is not M. Danglars, the bill will be paid, you may be tranquil.”

Mme Danglars mechanically took the sight bill, the rent coupon, and the bundle of bank bills.

This enormous fortune appeared very little spread there on a table.

Mme Danglars, her eyes dry, but her breast swollen with sobs, gathered it up and locked the steel case in her bag, put the rent coupon and the sight bill in her portfolio, and standing, pale, mute, she awaited a sweet word to console her for being so rich.

But she awaited in vain.

“Now, madame,” said Debray, “you have a magnificent existence, something like sixty thousand livres of income, which is enormous for a woman who will not be able to keep house, for a year at least.

“It is a privilege for all the fancies that may pass through your mind: not to mention that if you find your share insufficient, with regard to the past that escapes you, you may draw on mine, madame; and I am disposed to offer you, oh! as a loan, of course, all that I possess, that is to say one million sixty thousand francs.

“Thank you, sir,” replied the baroness, “thank you; you understand that you hand me there much more than is needed by a poor woman who does not count, for a long time at least, on reappearing in the world.”

Debray was astonished a moment, but he recovered and made a gesture which might be translated by the most polite formula to express this idea:

“As you please!”

Mme Danglars had perhaps until then still hoped for something; but when she saw the careless gesture which had just escaped Debray, and the oblique glance with which this gesture was accompanied, as well as the profound reverence and the significant silence which followed, she raised her head, opened the door, and without fury, without shock, but also without hesitation, she darted into the staircase, disdaining even to address a last salute to him who let her depart in this fashion.

“Bah!” said Debray when she was gone; “fine plans all this, she will remain in her hotel, read novels, and play lansquenet, not being able to play at the Bourse any more.”

And he took up his notebook, carefully striking out the sums he had just paid.

“I have left one million sixty thousand francs,” said he.

“What a misfortune that Mlle de Villefort is dead! that woman suited me in every respect, and I should have married her.”

And phlegmatically, according to his habit, he waited until Mme Danglars had been gone twenty minutes to decide to depart in his turn.

During those twenty minutes, Debray made figures, his watch placed beside him.

That diabolical personage whom every adventurous imagination would have created with more or less success if Le Sage had not acquired the property of him in his masterpiece, Asmodeus, who lifted the crust of houses to see inside them, would have enjoyed a singular spectacle if he had lifted, at the moment when Debray was making his figures, the crust of the small hotel on the rue Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Above that chamber where Debray had just divided two millions and a half with Mme Danglars, there was another chamber also peopled with inhabitants of our acquaintance, who have played a rather important role in the events we have just related for us to find them again with some interest.

There were in that chamber Mercédès and Albert.

Mercédès was much changed since a few days, not that, even in the time of her greatest fortune, she had ever displayed the proud pomp which contrasts visibly with all conditions, and makes one no longer recognize the woman as soon as she appears before you in simpler garments; not that she had fallen either to that state of depression where one is constrained to don the livery of misery; no, Mercédès was changed because her eye no longer shone, because her mouth no longer smiled, because finally a perpetual embarrassment arrested on her lips the rapid word which formerly a always-ready mind launched.

It was not poverty which had blighted the spirit of Mercédès, it was not lack of courage which made her poverty heavy to her.

Mercédès, descended from the milieu in which she lived, lost in the new sphere she had chosen for herself, like those persons who leave a splendidly lighted salon to pass suddenly into darkness; Mercédès seemed a queen descended from her palace into a cottage, and who, reduced to strict necessity, recognizes herself neither in the earthenware she is obliged to bring herself onto her table, nor in the pallet which has succeeded her bed.

Indeed, the beautiful Catalane or the noble countess no longer had either her proud glance or her charming smile, because in fixing her eyes on what surrounded her she saw only afflictive objects: it was a chamber hung with one of those gray-on-gray papers which economical proprietors prefer as being the least soiling; it was a tiled floor without carpet; it was furniture which attracted attention and forced the sight to rest on the poverty of a false luxury, all things finally which broke by their glaring tones the harmony so necessary to eyes accustomed to an elegant whole.

Mme de Morcerf had lived there since she had left her hotel; her head turned before that eternal silence as the head of the traveler arrived on the brink of an abyss turns: perceiving that at every minute Albert looked at her askance to judge the state of her heart, she had subjected herself to a monotonous smile of the lips which, in the absence of that so gentle fire of the smile of the eyes, produces the effect of a simple reflection of light, that is to say of a clarity without warmth.

For his part Albert was preoccupied, ill at ease, embarrassed by a remnant of luxury which prevented him from being of his present condition; he wanted to go out without gloves, and found his hands too white; he wanted to run about the city on foot, and found his boots too well polished.

However these two creatures so noble and so intelligent, indissolubly united by the bond of maternal and filial love, had succeeded in understanding each other without speaking of anything and in economizing all the privations that one owes among friends to establish that material truth on which life depends.

Albert had at last been able to say to his mother without making her pale:

“My mother, we have no more money.”

Never had Mercédès truly known misery; she had often, in her youth, spoken herself of poverty, but that is not the same thing: need and necessity are two synonyms between which there is a whole world of interval.

At the Catalans, Mercédès had need of a thousand things, but she never lacked certain others. As long as the nets were good, one caught fish; as long as one sold fish, one had thread to maintain the nets.

And then, isolated from friendship, having only a love which was for nothing in the material details of the situation, one thought of oneself, each for oneself, nothing but oneself.

Mercédès, from the little she had, made her share as generously as possible: today she had two shares to make, and that with nothing.

Winter was approaching: Mercédès, in that bare and already cold chamber, had no fire, she whose a calorifere with a thousand branches formerly heated the house from the antechambers to the boudoir; she had not a poor little flower, she whose apartment was a hothouse peopled at great cost!

But she had her son...

The exaltation of a perhaps exaggerated duty had sustained them until then in the superior spheres.

Exaltation is almost enthusiasm, and enthusiasm renders insensible to the things of earth.

But the enthusiasm had calmed, and it had been necessary to descend little by little from the land of dreams to the world of realities.

It was necessary to talk of the positive, after having exhausted all the ideal.

“My mother,” said Albert at the very moment when Mme Danglars was descending the staircase, “let us count a little all our riches, if you please; I need a total to erect my plans upon.”

“Total: nothing,” said Mercédès with a painful smile.

“Indeed yes, my mother, total: three thousand francs, first of all, and I have the pretension, with these three thousand francs, of leading the two of us an adorable life.

“Child!” sighed Mercédès.

“Alas! my good mother,” said the young man, “I have unfortunately spent enough of your money to know its worth.

“It is enormous, you see, three thousand francs, and I have built upon that sum a miraculous future of eternal security.

“You say that, my friend,” continued the poor mother; “but first, do we accept these three thousand francs?” said Mercédès blushing.

“But it is agreed, it seems to me,” said Albert in a firm tone; “we accept them all the more since we do not have them, for they are, as you know, buried in the garden of that small house in the Allées de Meilhan at Marseille.

“With two hundred francs,” said Albert, “we shall both go to Marseille.

“With two hundred francs!” said Mercédès, “do you think of it, Albert?”

“Oh! as to that point, I have informed myself at the stagecoaches and the steamboats, and my calculations are made.

“You book your places for Chalon, in the coupé: you see, my mother, that I treat you as a queen, thirty-five francs.”

Albert took a pen, and wrote:

Coupé, thirty-five francs, viz:...................................... 35 F From Chalon to Lyon, you go by the steamboat, six francs, viz:... 6 F From Lyon to Avignon, the steamboat again, sixteen francs, viz: 16 F From Avignon to Marseille, seven francs, viz:..................... 7 F Road expenses, fifty francs, viz:................................ 50 F TOTAL:............................................................114 F

“Let us put a hundred twenty,” added Albert smiling, “you see that I am generous, do you not, my mother?

“But you, my poor child?”

“Me! have you not seen that I reserve myself eighty francs?

“A young man, my mother, has not need of all his comforts; besides I know what traveling is.

“With your post-chaise and your valet de chambre.”

“However it may be, my mother.”

“Well, be it so,” said Mercédès; “but these two hundred francs?”

“These two hundred francs, here they are, and then two hundred more.

“See, I have sold my watch for a hundred francs, and the trinkets for three hundred.

“How fortunate! Trinkets which were worth three times the watch. Always that famous story of the superfluous!

“We are therefore rich, since, instead of the hundred fourteen francs that you needed to make your road, you have two hundred fifty.

“But we owe something in this hotel?”

“Thirty francs, but I pay them from my hundred fifty francs.

“That is agreed; and since I strictly need but eighty francs to make my road, you see that I swim in luxury.

“But that is not all.

“What do you say to this, my mother?”

And Albert drew from a small notebook with a gold clasp, a remnant of his former fancies or perhaps even a tender memory of some one of those mysterious and veiled women who knocked at the small door, Albert drew from a small notebook a bill of a thousand francs.

“What is this?” asked Mercédès.

“A thousand francs, my mother. Oh! it is perfectly square.”

“But where do these thousand francs come from you?”

“Listen to this, my mother, and do not get too emotional.”

And Albert, rising, went to kiss his mother on both cheeks, then he stopped to look at her.

“You have no idea, my mother, how beautiful I find you!” said the young man with a profound sentiment of filial love; “you are in truth the most beautiful as you are the noblest of the women I have ever seen!”

“Dear child,” said Mercédès, trying in vain to hold back a tear which pointed at the corner of her eyelid.

“In truth, you lacked only to be unhappy to change my love into adoration.”

“I am not unhappy so long as I have my son,” said Mercédès; “I shall not be unhappy so long as I have him.”

“Ah! precisely,” said Albert; “but there begins the trial, my mother: you know what is agreed!

“We are agreed upon something?” asked Mercédès.

“Yes, it is agreed that you will live at Marseille, and that I shall leave for Africa, where, in place of the name I have quit, I shall make myself the name I have taken.”

Mercédès uttered a sigh.

“Well, my mother, since yesterday I am engaged in the spahis,” added the young man, lowering his eyes with a certain shame, for he did not himself know all that his abasement had of sublime; “or rather I thought my body was well my own and that I could sell it; since yesterday I replace someone.

“I have sold myself, as they say, and,” added he, trying to smile, “dearer than I thought myself worth, that is to say two thousand francs.”

“So these thousand francs?...” said Mercédès, trembling.

“It is half the sum, my mother; the other will come in a year.”

Mercédès raised her eyes to heaven with an expression that nothing could render, and the two tears arrested at the corner of her eyelid, overflowing under the inward emotion, flowed silently down her cheeks.

“The price of his blood!” she murmured.

“Yes, if I am killed,” said Morcerf laughing; “but I assure you, good mother, that I am on the contrary in the intention of cruelly defending my skin; I never felt so good a wish to live as now.”

“My God! my God!” said Mercédès.

“Besides, why do you want me to be killed, my mother?

“Was Lamoricière, that other Ney of the Midi, killed?

“Was Changarnier killed?

“Was Bedeau killed?

“Was Morrel, whom we know, killed?

“Think of your joy, my mother, when you see me return with my embroidered uniform!

“I declare to you that I count on being superb underneath it, and that I chose that regiment out of coquetry.”

Mercédès sighed, while trying to smile; she understood, that holy mother, that it was ill in her to let her child bear alone the whole weight of the sacrifice.

“Well then!” resumed Albert, “you understand, my mother, here are already more than four thousand francs assured for you: with these four thousand francs you will live two good years.”

“Do you think so?” said Mercédès.

These words had escaped the countess, and with a sorrow so true that their true sense did not escape Albert; he felt his heart contract, and, taking his mother's hand, which he tenderly pressed in his:

“Yes, you will live!” said he.

“I shall live!” cried Mercédès, “but you will not leave, will you, my son?”

“I shall leave, my mother,” said Albert in a calm and firm voice; “you love me too much to leave me near you idle and useless; besides I have signed.”

“You will do according to your will, my son; I shall do according to that of God.”

“Not according to my will, my mother, but according to reason, according to necessity. We are two desperate creatures, are we not? What is life for you today? nothing. What is life for me? oh! very little without you, my mother, believe it; for without you that life, I swear to you, would have ceased from the day I doubted my father and renounced his name! Finally, I live, if you promise me to hope still; if you leave me the care of your future happiness, you double my strength. Then I shall go find there the governor of Algeria, he is a loyal heart and above all essentially a soldier; I tell him my dismal story: I beg him to turn from time to time his eyes toward the side where I shall be, and if he keeps his word, if he watches me do, before six months I am officer or dead. If I am officer, your lot is assured, my mother, for I shall have money for you and for me, besides a new name of which we shall both be proud, since it will be your true name. If I am killed... well, if I am killed, then, dear mother, you will die, if you please, and then our misfortunes will have their term in their very excess.”

“It is well,” replied Mercédès with her noble and eloquent glance; “you are right, my son: let us prove to certain persons who look at us and await our acts to judge us, let us prove to them that we are at least worthy of being pitied.”

“But no funereal ideas, dear mother!” cried the young man; “I swear to you that we are, or at least that we can be, very happy. You are at once a woman full of wit and of resignation; I have become simple in taste and without passion, I hope. Once in the service, there I am rich; once in the house of M. Dantès, there you are tranquil. Let us try! I beg you, my mother, let us try.”

“Yes, let us try, my son, for you must live, for you must be happy,” replied Mercédès.

“Thus, my mother, there is our division made,” added the young man, affecting a great ease. “We can leave this very day. Come, I book, as said, your place.”

“But yours, my son?”

“I must remain two or three days more, my mother; it is a beginning of separation, and we need to accustom ourselves to it. I need some recommendations, some information on Africa, I shall rejoin you at Marseille.”

“Well, be it so, let us leave!” said Mercédès, wrapping herself in the only shawl she had brought, and which happened to be a black cashmere of great price; “let us leave!”

Albert gathered up hastily his papers, rang to pay the thirty francs he owed the master of the hotel, and, offering his arm to his mother, he descended the staircase.

Someone was descending before them; that someone, hearing the brushing of a silk dress on the banister, turned around.

“Debray!” murmured Albert.

“You, Morcerf!” replied the minister's secretary, stopping on the step where he was.

Curiosity prevailed in Debray over the desire to keep incognito; besides he was recognized.

It seemed piquant, indeed, to find again in that unknown hotel the young man whose unhappy adventure had just made so great a scandal in Paris.

“Morcerf!” repeated Debray.

Then, perceiving in the half-obscurity the still youthful figure and the black veil of Mme de Morcerf:

“Oh! pardon,” added he with a smile, “I leave you, Albert.”

Albert understood Debray's thought.

“My mother,” said he, turning toward Mercédès, “it is M. Debray, secretary of the minister of the Interior, a former friend of mine.”

“How! former,” stammered Debray; “what do you mean?”

“I say that, M. Debray,” resumed Albert, “because today I have no more friends, and should have none more. I thank you much for having deigned to recognize me, sir.”

Debray remounted two steps and came to give an energetic handshake to his interlocutor.

“Believe, my dear Albert,” said he with the emotion he was susceptible of having, “believe that I took a deep part in the misfortune which strikes you, and that, for all things, I place myself at your disposal.”

“Thanks, sir,” said Albert smiling; “but in the midst of that misfortune, we have remained rich enough to need to have recourse to no one; we are leaving Paris, and, our journey paid, we have five thousand francs left.”

Red mounted to Debray's brow, who held a million in his portfolio; and however little poetic that exact mind was, he could not prevent himself from reflecting that the same house had still lately contained two women, of whom the one, justly dishonored, went away poor with fifteen hundred thousand francs under the fold of her mantle, and the other, unjustly struck, but sublime in her misfortune, found herself rich with a few coins.

This parallel disconcerted his combinations of politeness, the philosophy of the example crushed him; he stammered some words of general civility and descended rapidly.

That day, the clerks of the ministry, his subordinates, suffered much from his cross humor.

But in the evening he made himself purchaser of a very fine house, situated on the boulevard de la Madeleine, and yielding fifty thousand livres of income.

The next day, at the hour when Debray signed the deed, that is to say about five o'clock in the evening, Mme de Morcerf, after having tenderly embraced her son and having been tenderly embraced by him, mounted into the coupé of the stagecoach, which closed upon her.

A man was hidden in the courtyard of the Laffitte messaging behind one of those cintrated entresol windows which surmount each office; he saw Mercédès mount into the carriage; he saw the stagecoach depart; he saw Albert withdraw.

Then he passed his hand over his brow charged with doubt, saying:

“Alas! by what means shall I restore to these two innocents the happiness I have taken from them? God will help me.”

“Stories of the world, in your language.”