our minds on waking keep the impression of a vivid dream and continue in love with what we know was but a shadow, la Peyrade had need of all his mental energy to drive away the memory of that treacherous countess.  We might go further and say that he never ceased to long for her, though he was careful to drape with an honest pretext the intense desire that he had to find her.  That desire he called curiosity, ardor for revenge; and here follow the ingenious deductions which he drew for himself:—­

“Cerizet talked to me about a rich heiress; the countess, in her letter, intimates that the whole intrigue she wound about me was to lead to a rich marriage; rich marriages flung at a man’s head are not so plentiful that two such chances should come to me within a few weeks; therefore the match offered by Cerizet and that proposed by the countess must be the crazy girl they are so frantic to make me marry; therefore Cerizet, being in the plot, must know the countess; therefore, through him I shall get upon her traces.  In any case, I am sure of information about this extraordinary choice that has fallen upon me; evidently, these people, whoever they are, who can pull the wires of such puppets to reach their ends must be persons of considerable position; therefore, I’ll go and see Cerizet.”

And he went to see Cerizet.

Since the dinner at the Rocher de Cancale, the pair had not met.  Once or twice la Peyrade had asked Dutocq at the Thuilliers’ (where the latter seldom went now, on account of the distance to their new abode) what had become of his copying clerk.

“He never speaks of you,” Dutocq had answered.

Hence it might be inferred that resentment, the “manet alta mente repostum” was still living in the breast of the vindictive usurer.  La Peyrade, however, was not stopped by that consideration.  After all, he was not going to ask for anything; he went under the pretext of renewing an affair in which Cerizet had taken part, and Cerizet never took part in anything unless he had a personal interest in it.  The chances were, therefore, that he would be received with affectionate eagerness rather than unpleasant acerbity.  Moreover, he decided to go and see the copying clerk at Dutocq’s office; it would look, he thought, less like a visit than if he went to his den in the rue des Poules.  It was nearly two o’clock when la Peyrade made his entrance into the precincts of the justice-of-peace of the 12th arrondissement.  He crossed the first room, in which were a crowd of persons whom civil suits of one kind or another summoned before the magistrate.  Without pausing in that waiting-room, la Peyrade pushed on to the office adjoining that of Dutocq.  There he found Cerizet at a shabby desk of blackened wood, at which another clerk, then absent, occupied the opposite seat.

Seeing his visitor, Cerizet cast a savage look at him and said, without rising, or suspending the copy of the judgment he was then engrossing:—­