“Our first point must be to find him a servant.”

“That will be difficult; he must be tolerably wide-awake,” observed Jacqueline.

“Well, hatred keeps one alive!  We must work hard.”

Jacques Collin took a cab and drove at once to the Quai Malaquais, to the little room he lodged in, quite separate from Lucien’s apartment.  The porter, greatly astonished at seeing him, wanted to tell him all that had happened.

“I know everything,” said the Abbe.  “I have been involved in it, in spite of my saintly reputation; but, thanks to the intervention of the Spanish Ambassador, I have been released.”

He hurried up to his room, where, from under the cover of a breviary, he took out a letter that Lucien had written to Madame de Serizy after that lady had discarded him on seeing him at the opera with Esther.

Lucien, in his despair, had decided on not sending this letter, believing himself cast off for ever; but Jacques Collin had read the little masterpiece; and as all that Lucien wrote was to him sacred, he had treasured the letter in his prayer-book for its poetical expression of a passion that was chiefly vanity.  When Monsieur de Granville told him of Madame de Serizy’s condition, the keen-witted man had very wisely concluded that this fine lady’s despair and frenzy must be the result of the quarrel she had allowed to subsist between herself and Lucien.  He knew women as magistrates know criminals; he guessed the most secret impulses of their hearts; and he at once understood that the Countess probably ascribed Lucien’s death partly to her own severity, and reproached herself bitterly.  Obviously a man on whom she had shed her love would never have thrown away his life!  —­To know that he had loved her still, in spite of her cruelty, might restore her reason.

If Jacques Collin was a grand general of convicts, he was, it must be owned, a not less skilful physician of souls.

This man’s arrival at the mansion of the Serizys was at once a disgrace and a promise.  Several persons, the Count, and the doctors were assembled in the little drawing-room adjoining the Countess’ bedroom; but to spare him this stain on his soul’s honor, the Comte de Bauvan dismissed everybody, and remained alone with his friend.  It was bad enough even then for the Vice-President of the Privy Council to see this gloomy and sinister visitor come in.

Jacques Collin had changed his dress.  He was in black with trousers, and a plain frock-coat, and his gait, his look, and his manner were all that could be wished.  He bowed to the two statesmen, and asked if he might be admitted to see the Countess.

“She awaits you with impatience,” said Monsieur de Bauvan.

“With impatience!  Then she is saved,” said the dreadful magician.

And, in fact, after an interview of half an hour, Jacques Collin opened the door and said: 

“Come in, Monsieur le Comte; there is nothing further to fear.”