“Well, no,” replied Thuillier, striking his hand upon the table, “I shall not name him, because of the sentiments of esteem and affection which formerly united us; but you have understood me, Monsieur la Peyrade.”

“I ought to have known,” said the Provencal, in a voice changed by emotion, “that in bringing a serpent to this place I should soon be soiled by his venom.  Poor fool! do you not see that you have made yourself the echo of Cerizet’s calumny?”

“Cerizet has nothing to do with it; on the contrary, he has told me the highest good of you.  How was it, not having a penny the night before,—­and I had reason to know it,—­that you were able to pay Dutocq the round sum of twenty-five thousand francs the next day?”

La Peyrade reflected for a moment.

“No,” he said, “it was not Dutocq who told you that.  He is not a man to wrestle with an enemy of my strength without a strong interest in it.  It was Cerizet; he’s the infamous calumniator, from whose hands I wrenched the lease of your house near the Madeleine,—­Cerizet, whom in kindness, I went to seek on his dunghill that I might give him the chance of honorable employment; that is the wretch, to whom a benefit is only an encouragement to treachery.  Tiens! if I were to tell you what that man is I should turn you sick with disgust; in the sphere of infamy he has discovered worlds.”

This time Thuillier made an able reply.

“I don’t know anything about Cerizet except through you,” he said; “you introduced him to me as a manager, offering every guarantee; but, allowing him to be blacker than the devil, and supposing that this communication comes from him, I don’t see, my friend, that all that makes YOU any the whiter.”

“No doubt I was to blame,” said la Peyrade, “for putting such a man into relations with you; but we wanted some one who understood journalism, and that value he really had for us.  But who can ever sound the depths of souls like his?  I thought him reformed.  A manager, I said to myself, is only a machine; he can do no harm.  I expected to find him a man of straw; well, I was mistaken, he will never be anything but a man of mud.”

“All that is very fine,” said Thuillier, “but those twenty-five thousand francs found so conveniently in your possession, where did you get them?  That is the point you are forgetting to explain.”

“But to reason about it,” said la Peyrade; “a man of my character in the pay of the police and yet so poor that I could not pay the ten thousand francs your harpy of a sister demanded with an insolence which you yourself witnessed—­”

“But,” said Thuillier, “if the origin of this money is honest, as I sincerely desire it may be, what hinders you from telling me how you got it?”

“I cannot,” said la Peyrade; “the history of that money is a secret entrusted to me professionally.”

“Come, come, you told me yourself that the statutes of your order forbid all barristers from doing business of any kind.”