and Madame Jules.  To throw light on these suspicions he had the broken axle brought to his room and sent for his carriage-maker.  The man examined the axle and the fracture, and proved two things:  First, the axle was not made in his workshop; he furnished none that did not bear the initials of his name on the iron.  But he could not explain by what means this axle had been substituted for the other.  Secondly, the breakage of the suspicious axle was caused by a hollow space having been blown in it and a straw very cleverly inserted.

“Eh!  Monsieur le baron, whoever did that was malicious!” he said; “any one would swear, to look at it, that the axle was sound.”

Monsieur de Maulincour begged the carriage-maker to say nothing of the affair; but he felt himself warned.  These two attempts at murder were planned with an ability which denoted the enmity of intelligent minds.

“It is war to the death,” he said to himself, as he tossed in his bed, —­“a war of savages, skulking in ambush, of trickery and treachery, declared in the name of Madame Jules.  What sort of man is this to whom she belongs?  What species of power does this Ferragus wield?”

Monsieur de Maulincour, though a soldier and brave man, could not repress a shudder.  In the midst of many thoughts that now assailed him, there was one against which he felt he had neither defence nor courage:  might not poison be employed ere long by his secret enemies?  Under the influence of fears, which his momentary weakness and fever and low diet increased, he sent for an old woman long attached to the service of his grandmother, whose affection for himself was one of those semi-maternal sentiments which are the sublime of the commonplace.  Without confiding in her wholly, he charged her to buy secretly and daily, in different localities, the food he needed; telling her to keep it under lock and key and bring it to him herself, not allowing any one, no matter who, to approach her while preparing it.  He took the most minute precautions to protect himself against that form of death.  He was ill in his bed and alone, and he had therefore the leisure to think of his own security,—­the one necessity clear-sighted enough to enable human egotism to forget nothing!

But the unfortunate man had poisoned his own life by this dread, and, in spite of himself, suspicion dyed all his hours with its gloomy tints.  These two lessons of attempted assassination did teach him, however, the value of one of the virtues most necessary to a public man; he saw the wise dissimulation that must be practised in dealing with the great interests of life.  To be silent about our own secret is nothing; but to be silent from the start, to forget a fact as Ali Pacha did for thirty years in order to be sure of a vengeance waited for for thirty years, is a fine study in a land where there are few men who can keep their own counsel for thirty days.  Monsieur de Maulincour literally lived only through