Unfortunately, this sort of infamous speculation is not an exceptional fact; it takes place in Paris under various forms too little disguised for the historian of manners and morals to pass them over unnoticed in a complete and accurate picture of society in the nineteenth century.  Dutocq, an arrant scoundrel, still owed fifteen thousand francs on his practice, and lived in hopes of something turning up to keep his head, as the saying is, above water until the close of 1840.  Up to the present time none of the three confederates had flinched or groaned.  Each felt his strength and knew his danger.  Equals they were in distrust, in watchfulness; equals, too, in apparent confidence; and equally stolid in silence and look when mutual suspicions rose to the surface of face or speech.  For the last two months the position of Theodose was acquiring the strength of a detached fort.  But Cerizet and Dutocq held it undermined by a mass of powder, with the match ever lighted; but the wind might extinguish the match or the devil might flood the mine.

The moment when wild beasts seize their food is always the most critical, and that moment had now arrived for these three hungry tigers.  Cerizet would sometimes say to Theodose, with that revolutionary glance which twice in this century sovereigns have had to meet:—­

“I have made you king, and here am I still nothing! for it is nothing not to be all.”

A reaction of envy was rushing its avalanche through Cerizet.  Dutocq was at the mercy of his copying clerk.  Theodose would gladly have burned his copartners could he have burned their papers in the same conflagration.  All three studied each other too carefully, in order to conceal their own thoughts, not to be in turn divined.  Theodose lived a life of three hells as he thought of what lay below the cards, then of his own game, and then of his future.  His speech to Thuillier was a cry of despair; he threw his lead into the waters of the old bourgeois and found there nothing more than twenty-five thousand francs.

“And,” he said to himself as he went to his own room, “possibly nothing at all a month hence.”

He new felt the deepest hatred to the Thuilliers.  But Thuillier himself he held by a harpoon stuck into the depths of the man’s vanity; namely, by the projected work, entitled “Taxation and the Sinking Fund,” for which he intended to rearrange the ideas of the Saint-Simonian “Globe,” giving them a systematic form, and coloring them with his fervid Southern diction.  Thuillier’s bureaucratic knowledge of the subject would be of use to him here.  Theodose therefore clung to this rope, resolving to do battle, on so poor a base of operations, with the vanity of a fool, which, according to individual character, is either granite or sand.  On reflection, Theodose was inclined to be content with the prospect.

On the evening before the right of redemption expired, Claparon and Cerizet proceeded to manipulate the notary in the following manner.  Cerizet, to whom Claparon had revealed the password and the notary’s retreat, went out to this hiding-place to say to the latter:—­