"Oh, mon Dieu! mon Dieu! Monsieur will lose his place this time, then."
"Why?"
"Why? Why, after such scandalous behaviour on the part of a magistrate he is sure to lose his office, I tell you, and poor madame! What a shock it will be to her in her condition. What a life she leads! obliged to be always on the watch, adoring her husband, but in mortal terror all the while as to what he may say or do. But tell me how you happened to hear of this calamity."
"Well, I went to the palace an hour ago to take monsieur a letter. I found the whole place in a hubbub. The lawyers and all the rest of the people in the building were racing to and fro, and asking: 'Have you heard about it?' 'Is it possible?' It seems that after the court adjourned, the presiding judge summoned M. Cloarek into his office. He wanted to see him about his duel, some said."
"His duel? What duel?"
"The duel he fought this morning," answered Segoffin, phlegmatically.
And taking advantage of his companion's speechless consternation, he continued:
"Others declared that the chief judge had sent for him to see about a fracas monsieur had had with a countryman whom he nearly killed."
"What countryman?" asked Suzanne, with increasing alarm.
"The last one," answered Segoffin, naïvely. "Well, it seems, or at least so they told me at the palace, that monsieur went into the presiding judge's private office; they got to quarrelling, and one man finally threw the other man out of the window, and I know monsieur so well," added Segoffin, with a satisfied smile, "that I said to myself, 'If any one was thrown out of the window it must have been the other man, not monsieur,' and I was right. There is no undoing that which has been done."