By seven next morning Lisbeth had driven in a hackney coach to the Quai de la Tournelle, and stopped the vehicle at the corner of the Rue de Poissy.

“Go to the Rue des Bernardins,” said she to the driver, “No. 7, a house with an entry and no porter.  Go up to the fourth floor, ring at the door to the left, on which you will see ’Mademoiselle Chardin —­Lace and shawls mended.’  She will answer the door.  Ask for the Chevalier.  She will say he is out.  Say in reply, ’Yes, I know, but find him, for his bonne is out on the quay in a coach, and wants to see him.’”

Twenty minutes later, an old man, who looked about eighty, with perfectly white hair, and a nose reddened by the cold, and a pale, wrinkled face like an old woman’s, came shuffling slowly along in list slippers, a shiny alpaca overcoat hanging on his stooping shoulders, no ribbon at his buttonhole, the sleeves of an under-vest showing below his coat-cuffs, and his shirt-front unpleasantly dingy.  He approached timidly, looked at the coach, recognized Lisbeth, and came to the window.

“Why, my dear cousin, what a state you are in!”

“Elodie keeps everything for herself,” said Baron Hulot.  “Those Chardins are a blackguard crew.”

“Will you come home to us?”

“Oh, no, no!” cried the old man.  “I would rather go to America.”

“Adeline is on the scent.”

“Oh, if only some one would pay my debts!” said the Baron, with a suspicious look, “for Samanon is after me.”

“We have not paid up the arrears yet; your son still owes a hundred thousand francs.”

“Poor boy!”

“And your pension will not be free before seven or eight months.—­If you will wait a minute, I have two thousand francs here.”

The Baron held out his hand with fearful avidity.

“Give it me, Lisbeth, and may God reward you!  Give it me; I know where to go.”

“But you will tell me, old wretch?”

“Yes, yes.  Then I can wait eight months, for I have discovered a little angel, a good child, an innocent thing not old enough to be depraved.”

“Do not forget the police-court,” said Lisbeth, who flattered herself that she would some day see Hulot there.

“No.—­It is in the Rue de Charonne,” said the Baron, “a part of the town where no fuss is made about anything.  No one will ever find me there.  I am called Pere Thorec, Lisbeth, and I shall be taken for a retired cabinet-maker; the girl is fond of me, and I will not allow my back to be shorn any more.”

“No, that has been done,” said Lisbeth, looking at his coat.  “Supposing I take you there.”

Baron Hulot got into the coach, deserting Mademoiselle Elodie without taking leave of her, as he might have tossed aside a novel he had finished.

In half an hour, during which Baron Hulot talked to Lisbeth of nothing but little Atala Judici—­for he had fallen by degrees to those base passions that ruin old men—­she set him down with two thousand francs in his pocket, in the Rue de Charonne, Faubourg Saint-Antoine, at the door of a doubtful and sinister-looking house.