And at once he made haste to dress, and to go and see M. Galpin in order to hear all the details accurately, as he told his clerk, but, in reality, in order to enjoy to his heart’s content the discomfiture of the ambitious magistrate.
He found him furious, and ready to tear his hair.
“I am disgraced,” he repeated: “I am ruined; I am lost. All my prospects, all my hopes, are gone. I shall never be forgiven for such an oversight.”
To look at M. Daubigeon, you would have thought he was sincerely distressed.
“Is it really true,” he said with an air of assumed pity,—“is it really true, what they tell me, that this unlucky mistake was made by you?”
“By me? Yes, indeed! I forgot those wretched details which a scholar knows by heart. Can you understand that? And to say that no one noticed my inconceivable blindness! Neither the first court of inquiry, nor the attorney-general himself, nor the presiding judge, ever said a word about it. It is my fate. And that is to be the result of my labors. Everybody, no doubt, said, ‘Oh! M. Galpin has the case in hand; he knows all about it: no need to look after the matter when such a man has taken hold of it.’ And here I am. Oh! I might kill myself.”
“It is all the more fortunate,” replied M. Daubigeon, “that yesterday the case was hanging on a thread.”
The magistrate gnashed his teeth, and replied,—
“Yes, on a thread, thanks to M. Domini! whose weakness I cannot comprehend, and who did not know at all, or who was not willing to know, how to make the most of the evidence. But it was M. Gransiere’s fault quite as much. What had he to do with politics to drag them into the affair? And whom did he want to hit? No one else but M. Magloire, the man whom everybody respects in the whole district, and who had three warm personal friends among the jurymen. I foresaw it, and I told him where he would get into trouble. But there are people who will not listen. M. Gransiere wants to be elected himself. It is a fancy, a monomania of our day: everybody wants to be a deputy. I wish Heaven would confound all ambitious men!”
For the first time in his life, and no doubt for the last time also, the commonwealth attorney rejoiced at the misfortune of others. Taking savage pleasure in turning the dagger in his poor friend’s wounds, he said,—