“You aimed too well, monsieur,” said the baron, “to be avenging only a paltry quarrel.”

And he fainted.  Monsieur de Ronquerolles, who believed him to be a dead man, smiled sardonically as he heard those words.

After a fortnight, during which time the dowager and the vidame gave him those cares of old age the secret of which is in the hands of long experience only, the baron began to return to life.  But one morning his grandmother dealt him a crushing blow, by revealing anxieties to which, in her last days, she was now subjected.  She showed him a letter signed F, in which the history of her grandson’s secret espionage was recounted step by step.  The letter accused Monsieur de Maulincour of actions that were unworthy of a man of honor.  He had, it said, placed an old woman at the stand of hackney-coaches in the rue de Menars; an old spy, who pretended to sell water from her cask to the coachmen, but who was really there to watch the actions of Madame Jules Desmarets.  He had spied upon the daily life of a most inoffensive man, in order to detect his secrets,—­secrets on which depended the lives of three persons.  He had brought upon himself a relentless struggle, in which, although he had escaped with life three times, he must inevitably succumb, because his death had been sworn and would be compassed if all human means were employed upon it.  Monsieur de Maulincour could no longer escape his fate by even promising to respect the mysterious life of these three persons, because it was impossible to believe the word of a gentleman who had fallen to the level of a police-spy; and for what reason?  Merely to trouble the respectable life of an innocent woman and a harmless old man.

The letter itself was nothing to Auguste in comparison to the tender reproaches of his grandmother.  To lack respect to a woman! to spy upon her actions without a right to do so!  Ought a man ever to spy upon a woman whom he loved?—­in short, she poured out a torrent of those excellent reasons which prove nothing; and they put the young baron, for the first time in his life, into one of those great human furies in which are born, and from which issue the most vital actions of a man’s life.

“Since it is war to the knife,” he said in conclusion, “I shall kill my enemy by any means that I can lay hold of.”

The vidame went immediately, at Auguste’s request, to the chief of the private police of Paris, and without bringing Madame Jules’ name or person into the narrative, although they were really the gist of it, he made the official aware of the fears of the family of Maulincour about this mysterious person who was bold enough to swear the death of an officer of the Guards, in defiance of the law and the police.  The chief pushed up his green spectacles in amazement, blew his nose several times, and offered snuff to the vidame, who, to save his dignity, pretended not to use tobacco, although his own nose was discolored with it.  Then the chief took notes and promised, Vidocq and his spies aiding, to send in a report within a few days to the Maulincour family, assuring them meantime that there were no secrets for the police of Paris.