“I immediately set about devising the means of procuring my liberty.  There certainly had been nothing actually criminal in my conduct; and supposing even that our felonious intention was established by the evidence of Marcel, I knew that criminal intentions alone were not punishable.  I resolved to write immediately to my father, and beg of him to come himself to Paris.  I felt much less humiliation, as I have already said, in being in Le Chatelet than in St. Lazare.  Besides, although I preserved, all proper respect for the paternal authority, age and experience had considerably lessened my timidity.  I wrote, and they made no difficulty in the prison about forwarding my letter; but it was a trouble I should have spared myself, had I known that my father was about to arrive on the following day in Paris.  He had received the letter I had written to him a week before; it gave him extreme delight; but, notwithstanding the flattering hopes I had held out of my conversion, he could not implicitly rely on my statements.  He determined therefore to satisfy himself of my reformation by the evidence of his own senses, and to regulate his conduct towards me according to his conviction of my sincerity.  He arrived the day after my imprisonment.

“His first visit was to Tiberge, to whose care I begged that he would address his answer.  He could not learn from him either my present abode or condition:  Tiberge merely told him of my principal adventures since I had escaped from St. Lazare.  Tiberge spoke warmly of the disposition to virtue which I had evinced at our last interview.  He added, that he considered me as having quite got rid of Manon; but that he was nevertheless surprised at my not having given him any intelligence about myself for a week.  My father was not to be duped.  He fully comprehended that there was something in the silence of which Tiberge complained, which had escaped my poor friend’s penetration; and he took such pains to find me out, that in two days after his arrival he learned that I was in Le Chatelet.

“Before I received this visit, which I little expected so soon, I had the honour of one from the lieutenant-general of police, or, to call things by their right names, I was subjected to an official examination.  He upbraided me certainly, but not in any harsh or annoying manner.  He told me, in the kindest tone, that he bitterly lamented my bad conduct; that I had committed a gross indiscretion in making an enemy of such a man as M. G——­ M——­; that in truth it was easy to see that there was, in the affair, more of imprudence and folly than of malice; but that still it was the second time I had been brought as a culprit under his cognisance; and that he had hoped I should have become more sedate, after the experience of two or three months in St. Lazare.