“No.  No relation at all.”

“Intimate friend?”

“Intimate . . . yes.  There is between us an intimate connection of a nature which makes it a point of honour with me to try . . .”

The minister rang a bell without waiting for the end of the phrase.  When the servant had gone out, after bringing in a pair of heavy silver candelabra for the writing-desk, the Duke of Otranto rose, his breast glistening all over with gold in the strong light, and taking a piece of paper out of a drawer, held it in his hand ostentatiously while he said with persuasive gentleness:  “You must not speak of breaking your sword across your knee, General.  Perhaps you would never get another.  The Emperor will not return this time. . . .  Diable d’homme!  There was just a moment, here in Paris, soon after Waterloo, when he frightened me.  It looked as though he were ready to begin all over again.  Luckily one never does begin all over again, really.  You must not think of breaking your sword, General.”

General D’Hubert, looking on the ground, moved slightly his hand in a hopeless gesture of renunciation.  The Minister of Police turned his eyes away from him, and scanned deliberately the paper he had been holding up all the time.

“There are only twenty general officers selected to be made an example of.  Twenty.  A round number.  And let’s see, Feraud. . . .  Ah, he’s there.  Gabriel Florian.  Parfaitement.  That’s your man.  Well, there will be only nineteen examples made now.”

General D’Hubert stood up feeling as though he had gone through an infectious illness.  “I must beg your Excellency to keep my interference a profound secret.  I attach the greatest importance to his never learning . . .”

“Who is going to inform him, I should like to know?” said Fouche, raising his eyes curiously to General D’Hubert’s tense, set face.  “Take one of these pens, and run it through the name yourself.  This is the only list in existence.  If you are careful to take up enough ink no one will be able to tell what was the name struck out.  But, par exemple, I am not responsible for what Clarke will do with him afterwards.  If he persists in being rabid he will be ordered by the Minister of War to reside in some provincial town under the supervision of the police.”

A few days later General D’Hubert was saying to his sister, after the first greetings had been got over:  “Ah, my dear Leonie! it seemed to me I couldn’t get away from Paris quick enough.”

“Effect of love,” she suggested, with a malicious smile.

“And horror,” added General D’Hubert, with profound seriousness.  “I have nearly died there of . . . of nausea.”

His face was contracted with disgust.  And as his sister looked at him attentively he continued, “I have had to see Fouche.  I have had an audience.  I have been in his cabinet.  There remains with one, who had the misfortune to breathe the air of the same room with that man, a sense of diminished dignity, an uneasy feeling of being not so clean, after all, as one hoped one was. . . .  But you can’t understand.”