Schmucke drew his chair to the table, but he could eat nothing.  A sudden, somewhat sharp ringing of the door-bell rang through the house, and Mme. Cantinet and Mme. Sauvage allowed three black-coated personages to pass.  First came Vitel, the justice of the peace, with his highly respectable clerk; third was Fraisier, neither sweeter nor milder for the disappointing discovery of a valid will canceling the formidable instrument so audaciously stolen by him.

“We have come to affix seals on the property,” the justice of the peace said gently, addressing Schmucke.  But the remark was Greek to Schmucke; he gazed in dismay at his three visitors.

“We have come at the request of M. Fraisier, legal representative of M. Camusot de Marville, heir of the late Pons—­” added the clerk.

“The collection is here in this great room, and in the bedroom of the deceased,” remarked Fraisier.

“Very well, let us go into the next room.—­Pardon us, sir; do not let us interrupt with your breakfast.”

The invasion struck an icy chill of terror into poor Schmucke.  Fraisier’s venomous glances seemed to possess some magnetic influence over his victims, like the power of a spider over a fly.

“M.  Schmucke understood how to turn a will, made in the presence of a notary, to his own advantage,” he said, “and he surely must have expected some opposition from the family.  A family does not allow itself to be plundered by a stranger without some protest; and we shall see, sir, which carries the day—­fraud and corruption or the rightful heirs. . . .  We have a right as next of kin to affix seals, and seals shall be affixed.  I mean to see that the precaution is taken with the utmost strictness.”

“Ach, mein Gott! how haf I offended against Hefn?” cried the innocent Schmucke.

“There is a good deal of talk about you in the house,” said La Sauvage.  “While you were asleep, a little whipper-snapper in a black suit came here, a puppy that said he was M. Hannequin’s head-clerk, and must see you at all costs; but as you were asleep and tired out with the funeral yesterday, I told him that M. Villemot, Tabareau’s head-clerk, was acting for you, and if it was a matter of business, I said, he might speak to M. Villemot.  ‘Ah, so much the better!’ the youngster said.  ’I shall come to an understanding with him.  We will deposit the will at the Tribunal, after showing it to the President.’  So at that, I told him to ask M. Villemot to come here as soon as he could.—­Be easy, my dear sir, there are those that will take care of you.  They shall not shear the fleece off your back.  You will have some one that has beak and claws.  M. Villemot will give them a piece of his mind.  I have put myself in a passion once already with that abominable hussy, La Cibot, a porter’s wife that sets up to judge her lodgers, forsooth, and insists that you have filched the money from the heirs; you locked M. Pons up, she says, and worked upon him till he was stark, staring mad.  She got as good as she gave, though, the wretched woman.  ‘You are a thief and a bad lot,’ I told her; ’you will get into the police-courts for all the things that you have stolen from the gentlemen,’ and she shut up.”