“Do you come for any more signatures?” he had exclaimed.  “You shall have them.  If you want any thing else, your servant.

“’When the blunder is made,
It is too late, I tell thee, to come for advice.’”

However discouraging such a welcome might be, M. Galpin did not give up his purpose.  He said in his bitterest tone,—­

“You still insist that it is a blunder to do one’s duty.  Has not a crime been committed?  Is it not my duty to find out the author, and to have him punished?  Well?  Is it my fault if the author of this crime is an old friend of mine, and if I was once upon a time on the point of marrying a relation of his?  There is no one in court who doubts M. de Boiscoran’s guilt; there is no one who dares blame me:  and yet they are all as cold as ice towards me.”

“Such is the world,” said M. Daubigeon with a face full of irony.  “They praise virtue; but they hate it.”

“Well, yes! that is so,” cried M. Galpin in his turn.  “Yes, they blame people who have done what they had not the courage to do.  The attorney general has congratulated me, because he judges things from on high and impartially.  Here cliques are all-powerful.  Even those who ought to encourage and support me, cry out against me.  My natural ally, the commonwealth attorney, forsakes me and laughs at me.  The president of the court, my immediate superior, said to me this morning with intolerable irony, ’I hardly know any magistrate who would be able as you are to sacrifice his relations and his friends to the interests of truth and justice.  You are one of the ancients:  you will rise high.’”

His friend could not listen any further.  He said,—­

“Let us break off there:  we shall never understand each other.  Is Jacques de Boiscoran innocent, or guilty?  I do not know.  But I do know that he was the pleasantest man in the world, an admirable host, a good talker, a scholar, and that he owned the finest editions of Horace and Juvenal that I have ever seen.  I liked him.  I like him still; and it distresses me to think of him in prison.  I know that we had the most pleasant relations with each other, and that now they are broken off.  And you, you complain!  Am I the ambitious man?  Do I want to have my name connected with a world-famous trial?  M. de Boiscoran will in all probability be condemned.  You ought to be delighted.  And still you complain?  Why, one cannot have everything.  Who ever undertook a great enterprise, and never repented of it?”

After that there was nothing left for M. Galpin but to go away.  He did go in a fury, but at the same time determined to profit by the rude truths which M. Daubigeon had told him; for he knew very well that his friend represented in his views nearly the whole community.  He was fully prepared to carry out his plan.  Immediately after his return, he communicated the papers of the prosecution to the defence, and directed his clerk to show himself as obliging as he could.  M. Mechinet was not a little surprised at these orders.  He knew his master thoroughly,—­this magistrate, whose shadow he had been now for so many years.