the bosom of his charity.  The heart of all persons with a mania is like those boxes with compartments, in which sugarplums are kept in sorts:  “suum cuique tribuere” is their motto; they measure to each duty its dose.  There are some philanthropists who pity nothing but the man condemned to death.  Vanity is certainly the basis of philanthropy; but in the case of this Provencal it was calculation, a predetermined course, a “liberal” and democratic hypocrisy, played with a perfection that no other actor will ever attain.

Theodose did not attack the rich; he contented himself with not understanding them; he endured them; every one, in his opinion, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labor.  He had been, he said, a fervent disciple of Saint-Simon, but that mistake must be attributed to his youth:  modern society could have no other basis than heredity.  An ardent Catholic, like all men from the Comtat, he went to the earliest morning masses, and thus concealed his piety.  Like other philanthropists, he practised a sordid economy, and gave to the poor his time, his legal advice, his eloquence, and such money as he extracted for them from the rich.  His clothes, always of black cloth, were worn until the seams became white.  Nature had done a great deal for Theodose in not giving him that fine manly Southern beauty which creates in others an imaginary expectation, to which it is more than difficult for a man to respond.  As it was, he could be what suited him at the moment,—­an agreeable man or a very ordinary one.  Never, since his admission to the Thuilliers’, had he ventured, till this evening, to raise his voice and speak as dogmatically as he had risked doing to Olivier Vinet; but perhaps Theodose de la Peyrade was not sorry to seize the opportunity to come out from the shade in which he had hitherto kept himself.  Besides, it was necessary to get rid of the young substitute, just as the Minards had previously ruined the hopes of Monsieur Godeschal.  Like all superior men (for he certainly had some superiority), Vinet had never lowered himself to the point where the threads of these bourgeois spider-webs became visible to him, and he had therefore plunged, like a fly, headforemost, into the almost invisible trap to which Theodose inveigled him.

To complete this portrait of the poor man’s lawyer we must here relate the circumstances of his first arrival at the Thuilliers’.

Theodose came to lodge in Mademoiselle Thuillier’s house toward the close of the year 1837.  He had taken his degree about five years earlier, and had kept the proper number of terms to become a barrister.  Circumstances, however, about which he said nothing, had interfered to prevent his being called to the bar; he was, therefore, still a licentiate.  But soon after he was installed in the little apartment on the third floor, with the furniture rigorously required by all members of his noble profession,—­for the guild of barristers admits no brother unless he has a suitable study, a legal library, and can thus, as it were, verify his claims,—­Theodose de la Peyrade began to practise as a barrister before the Royal Court of Paris.