“Monsieur Legras, bring me ten thousand francs, and a note of hand for that amount, drawn to my order, at ninety days’ sight, by monsieur, who is Monsieur Cesar Birotteau, you know.”

Du Tillet cut the pate, poured out a glass of claret, and urged Cesar to eat.  The poor man felt he was saved, and gave way to convulsive laughter; he played with his watch-chain, and only put a mouthful into his mouth, when du Tillet said to him, “You are not eating!” Birotteau thus betrayed the depths of the abyss into which du Tillet’s hand had plunged him, from which that hand now withdrew him, and into which it had the power to plunge him again.  When the cashier returned, and Cesar signed the note, and felt the ten bank-notes in his pocket, he was no longer master of himself.  A moment sooner, and the Bank, his neighborhood, every one, was to know that he could not meet his payments, and he must have told his ruin to his wife; now, all was safe!  The joy of this deliverance equalled in its intensity the tortures of his peril.  The eyes of the poor man moistened, in spite of himself.

“What is the matter with you, my dear master?” asked du Tillet.  “Would you not do for me to-morrow what I do for you to-day?  Is it not as simple as saying, How do you do?”

“Du Tillet,” said the worthy man, with gravity and emphasis, and rising to take the hand of his former clerk, “I give you back my esteem.”

“What! had I lost it?” cried du Tillet, so violently stabbed in the very bosom of his prosperity that the color came into his face.

“Lost?—­well, not precisely,” said Birotteau, thunder-struck at his own stupidity:  “they told me certain things about your liaison with Madame Roguin.  The devil! taking the wife of another man—­”

“You are beating round the bush, old fellow,” thought du Tillet, and as the words crossed his mind he came back to his original project, and vowed to bring that virtue low, to trample it under foot, to render despicable in the marts of Paris the honorable and virtuous merchant who had caught him, red-handed, in a theft.  All hatreds, public or private, from woman to woman, from man to man, have no other cause then some such detection.  People do not hate each other for injured interests, for wounds, not even for a blow; all such wrongs can be redressed.  But to have been seized, flagrante delicto, in a base act!  The duel which follows between the criminal and the witness of his crime ends only with the death of the one or of the other.

“Oh!  Madame Roguin!” said du Tillet, jestingly, “don’t you call that a feather in a young man’s cap?  I understand you, my dear master; somebody has told you that she lent me money.  Well, on the contrary it is I who have protected her fortune, which was strangely involved in her husband’s affairs.  The origin of my fortune is pure, as I have just told you.  I had nothing, you know.  Young men are sometimes in positions of frightful necessity.  They may lose their self-control in the depths of poverty, and if they make, as the Republic made, forced loans—­well, they pay them back; and in so doing they are more honest than France herself.”