“I’ll speak to Claparon,” said Cerizet, pretending to go and consult him, and mounting the stairs to the bedroom, from which Claparon had only just departed on his road to Havre.

The two adversaries had been speaking, we should here remark, in a manner not to be overheard; and every time that Theodose raised his voice Cerizet would make a gesture, intimating that Claparon, from above, might be listening.  The five minutes during which Theodose heard what seemed to be the murmuring of two voices were torture to him, for he had staked his very life upon the issue.  Cerizet at last came down, with a smile upon his lips, his eyes sparkling with infernal mischief, his whole frame quivering in his joy, a Lucifer of gaiety!

“I know nothing, so it seems!” he cried, shaking his shoulders, “but Claparon knows a great deal; he has worked with the big-wig bankers, and when I told what you wanted he began to laugh, and said, ’I thought as much!’ You will have to bring me the twenty-five thousand you offer me to-morrow morning, my lad; and as much more before you can recover your notes.”

“Why?” asked Theodose, feeling his spinal column liquidizing as if the discharge of some inward electric fluid had melted it.

“The house is ours.”

“How?”

“Claparon has bit it in under the name of one of his creditors, a little toad named Sauvaignou.  Desroches, the lawyer, has taken the case, and you’ll get a notice to-morrow.  This affair will oblige Claparon, Dutocq, and me to raise funds.  What would become of me without Claparon!  So I forgive him—­yes, I forgave him, and though you may not believe it, my dear friend, I actually kissed him!  Change your terms.”

The last three words were horrible to hear, especially when illustrated by the face of the speaker, who amused himself by playing a scene from the “Legataire,” all the while studying attentively the Provencal’s character.

“Oh, Cerizet!” cried Theodose; “I, who wished to do you so much good!”

“Don’t you see, my dear fellow,” returned Cerizet, “that between you and me there ought to be this,—­” and he struck his heart,—­“of which you have none.  As soon as you thought you had a lever on us, you have tried to knock us over.  I saved you from the horrors of starvation and vermin!  You’ll die like the idiot you are.  We put you on the high-road to fortune; we gave you a fine social skin and a position in which you could grasp the future—­and look what you do! Now I know you! and from this time forth, we shall go armed.”

“Then it is war between us!” exclaimed Theodose.

“You fired first,” returned Cerizet.

“If you pull me down, farewell to your hopes and plans; if you don’t pull me down, you have in me an enemy.”

“That’s just what I said yesterday to Dutocq; but, how can we help it?  We are forced to choose between two alternatives—­we must go according to circumstances.  I’m a good-natured fellow myself,” he added, after a pause; “bring me your twenty-five thousand francs to-morrow morning and Thuillier shall keep the house.  We’ll continue to help you at both ends, but you’ll have to pay up, my boy.  After what has just happened that’s pretty kind, isn’t it?”