The change in Birotteau’s voice startled Crottat, who began to understand the importance of the warning; he fulfilled the instructions of the poor man, whom Celestin and Cesarine were horrified to find pale and half insensible in a corner of the carriage.

“Keep the secret,” he said.

“Ah!” said Xandrot to himself, “he is coming to.  I thought him lost.”

From thence they went, at Cesar’s request, to a judge of the commercial courts.  The conference between Crottat and the magistrate lasted long, and the president of the chamber of notaries was summoned.  Cesar was carried about from place to place, like a bale of goods; he never moved, and said nothing.  Towards seven in the evening Alexandre Crottat took him home.  The thought of appearing before Constance braced his nerves.  The young notary had the charity to go before, and warn Madame Birotteau that her husband had had a rush of blood to the head.

“His ideas are rather cloudy,” he said, with a gesture implying disturbance of the brain.  “Perhaps he should be bled, or leeches applied.”

“No wonder,” said Constance, far from dreaming of a disaster; “he did not take his precautionary medicine at the beginning of the winter, and for the last two months he has been working like a galley slave, —­just as if his fortune were not made.”

The wife and daughter entreated Cesar to go to bed, and they sent for his old friend Monsieur Haudry.  The old man was a physician of the school of Moliere, a great practitioner and in favor of the old-fashioned formulas, who dosed his patients neither more nor less than a quack, consulting physician though he was.  He came, studied the expression of Cesar’s face, and observing symptoms of cerebral congestion, ordered an immediate application of mustard plasters to the soles of his feet.

“What can have caused it?” asked Constance.

“The damp weather,” said the doctor, to whom Cesarine had given a hint.

It often becomes a physician’s duty to utter deliberately some silly falsehood, to save honor or life, to those who are about a sick-bed.  The old doctor had seen much in his day, and he caught the meaning of half a word.  Cesarine followed him to the staircase, and asked for directions in managing the case.

“Quiet and silence; when the head is clear we will try tonics.”

Madame Cesar passed two days at the bedside of her husband, who seemed to her at times delirious.  He lay in her beautiful blue room, and as he looked at the curtains, the furniture, and all the costly magnificence about him, he said things that were wholly incomprehensible to her.

“He must be out of his mind,” she whispered to Cesarine, as Cesar rose up in bed and recited clauses of the commercial Code in a solemn voice.

“‘If the expenditure is judged excessive!’ Away with those curtains!”

At the end of three terrible days, during which his reason was in danger, the strong constitution of the Tourangian peasant triumphed; his head grew clear.  Monsieur Haudry ordered stimulants and generous diet, and before long, after an occasional cup of coffee, Cesar was on his feet again.  Constance, wearied out, took her husband’s place in bed.