“Perhaps,” replied the woman, with renewed gesticulations, “perhaps; but I don’t advise any of you to try.  Anyhow, this fellow here is a rogue; he has been emptying his cellar for the last three nights; there were only old empty casks in it and empty packing-cases!  Oh yes!  I have swallowed his daily lies like everybody else, but I know the truth by now.  He got his liquor taken away by Michael Lambourne’s son, the cobbler in the rue de la Parcheminerie.  How do I know?  Why, because the young man came and told me!”

“I turned that woman out of my shop a month ago, for stealing,” said Derues.

Notwithstanding this retaliatory accusation, the woman’s bold assertion might have changed the attitude of the crowd and chilled the enthusiasm, but at that moment a stout man pressed forward, and seizing the hawker by the arm, said—­

“Go, and hold your tongue, backbiting woman!”

To this man, the honour of Derues was an article of faith; he had not yet ceased to wonder at the probity of this sainted person, and to doubt it in the least was as good as suspecting his own.

“My dear friend,” he said, “we all know what to think of you.  I know you well.  Send to me tomorrow, and you shall have what goods you want, on credit, for as long as is necessary.  Now, evil tongue, what do you say to that?”

“I say that you are as great a fool as the rest.  Adieu, friend Derues; go on as you have begun, and I shall be selling your ‘sentence’ some day”; and dispersing the crowd with a few twirls of her right arm, she passed on, crying—­

“Sentence pronounced by the Parliament of Paris against John Robert Cassel, accused and convicted of Fraudulent Bankruptcy!”

This accusation emanated from too insignificant a quarter to have any effect on Derues’ reputation.  However resentful he may have been at the time, he got over it in consequence of the reiterated marks of interest shown by his neighbours and all the quarter on account of his supposed ruin, and the hawker’s attack passed out of his mind, or probably she might have paid for her boldness with her life.

But this drunken woman had none the less uttered a prophetic word; it was the grain of sand on which, later, he was to be shipwrecked.

“All passions,” says La Bruyere,—­“all passions are deceitful; they disguise themselves as much as possible from the public eye; they hide from themselves.  There is no vice which has not a counterfeit resemblance to some virtue, and which does not profit by it.”

The whole life of Derues bears testimony to the truth of this observation.  An avaricious poisoner, he attracted his victims by the pretence of fervent and devoted piety, and drew them into the snare where he silently destroyed them.  His terrible celebrity only began in 1777, caused by the double murder of Madame de Lamotte and her son, and his name, unlike those of some other great criminals, does not at first