Great commotions of the soul are like those storms which purify the atmosphere; they induce reflection, they counsel good and strong resolutions.  La Peyrade, as the result of the cruel disappointment he had just endured, examined his own soul.  He asked himself what sort of existence was this, of base and ignoble intrigue, which he had led for the past year?  Was there for him no better, no nobler use to make of the faculties he felt within him?  The bar was open to him as to others; that was a broad, straight path which could lead him to all the satisfaction of legitimate ambition.  Like Figaro, who displayed more science and calculation in merely getting a living than statesmen had shown in governing Spain for a hundred years, he, la Peyrade, in order to install and maintain himself in the Thuillier household and marry the daughter of a clarionet and a smirched coquette, had spent more mind, more art, and—­it should also be said, because in a corrupt society it is an element that must be reckoned—­more dishonesty than was needed to advance him in some fine career.

“Enough of such connections as Dutocq and Cerizet,” he said to himself; “enough of the nauseating atmosphere of the Minards and Phellions and Collevilles and Barniols and all the rest of them.  I’ll shake off this province ‘intra muros,’ a thousand times more absurd and petty than the true provinces; they at least, side by side with their pettiness, have habits and customs that are characteristic, a ‘sui generis’ dignity; they are frankly what they are, the antipodes of Parisian life; this other is but a parody of it.  I will fling myself upon Paris.”

In consequence of these reflections, la Peyrade went to see two or three barristers who had offered to introduce him at the Palais in secondary cases.  He accepted those that presented themselves at once, and three weeks after his rupture with the Thuilliers he was no longer the “advocate of the poor,” but a barrister pleading before the Royal court.

He had already pleaded several cases successfully when he received, one morning, a letter which greatly disturbed him.  The president of the order of barristers requested him to come to his office at the Palais in the course of the day, as he had something of importance to say to him.  La Peyrade instantly thought of the transaction relating to the purchase of the house on the boulevard de la Madeleine; it must have come, he thought, to the ears of the Council of Discipline; if so he was accountable to that tribunal and he knew its severity.

Now this du Portail, whom he had never yet been to see, in spite of his conditional promise to Cerizet, was likely to have heard the whole story of that transaction from Cerizet himself.  Evidently all means were thought good by that man, judging by the use he had made of the Hungarian woman.  In his savage determination to bring about the marriage with the crazy girl, had this virulent old man denounced him?  On seeing him courageously and with some appearance of success entering a career in which he might find fame and independence, had his persecutor taken a step to make that career impossible?  Certainly there was enough likelihood in this suggestion to make the barrister wait in cruel anxiety for the hour when he might learn the true nature of the alarming summons.