“Much good may it do to him,” mumbled the elder.  “They were both brave men.  I never saw this D’Hubert—­a sort of intriguing dandy, I understand.  But I can well believe what I’ve heard Feraud say once of him—­that he never loved the emperor.”

They rose and went away.

General D’Hubert experienced the horror of a somnambulist who wakes up from a complacent dream of activity to find himself walking on a quagmire.  A profound disgust of the ground on which he was making his way overcame him.  Even the image of the charming girl was swept from his view in the flood of moral distress.  Everything he had ever been or hoped to be would be lost in ignominy unless he could manage to save General Feraud from the fate which threatened so many braves.  Under the impulse of this almost morbid need to attend to the safety of his adversary General D’Hubert worked so well with hands and feet (as the French saying is) that in less than twenty-four hours he found means of obtaining an extraordinary private audience from the Minister of Police.

General Baron D’Hubert was shown in suddenly without preliminaries.  In the dusk of the minister’s cabinet, behind the shadowy forms of writing desk, chairs, and tables, between two bunches of wax candles blazing in sconces, he beheld a figure in a splendid coat posturing before a tall mirror.  The old Conventional Fouche, ex-senator of the empire, traitor to every man, every principle and motive of human conduct, Duke of Otranto, and the wily artisan of the Second Restoration, was trying the fit of a court suit, in which his young and accomplished fiancee had declared her wish to have his portrait painted on porcelain.  It was a caprice, a charming fancy which the Minister of Police of the Second Restoration was anxious to gratify.  For that man, often compared in wiliness of intellect to a fox but whose ethical side could be worthily symbolised by nothing less emphatic than a skunk, was as much possessed by his love as General D’Hubert himself.

Startled to be discovered thus by the blunder of a servant, he met this little vexation with the characteristic effrontery which had served his turn so well in the endless intrigues of his self-seeking career.  Without altering his attitude a hair’s breadth, one leg in a silk stocking advanced, his head twisted over his left shoulder, he called out calmly: 

“This way, general.  Pray approach.  Well?  I am all attention.”

While General D’Hubert, as ill at ease as if one of his own little weaknesses had been exposed, presented his request as shortly as possible, the minister went on feeling the fit of his collar, settling the lappels before the glass or buckling his back in his efforts to behold the set of the gold-embroidered coat skirts behind.  His still face, his attentive eyes, could not have expressed a more complete interest in those matters if he had been alone.

“Exclude from the operations of the Special Commission a certain Feraud, Gabriel Florian, General of Brigade of the promotion of 1814?” he repeated in a slightly wondering tone and then turned away from the glass.  “Why exclude him precisely?”