"Ah, my friend, what a fine fellow that commissioner is! He does like you—he roars with the tigers and howls with the wolves!"
"What!" exploded the lawyer, taken aback. "Do you mean to say—?"
"I mean this worthy man understood that in demanding my arrest, poor friend, you were only playing a role. Not so, Charlotte?"
"Oh, yes! For he said to mother, 'In these times of revolution, honest men are obliged to wear a mask.'"
"And I made answer," continued Madam Desmarais, "that, in fact, you were obliged to howl with the wolves, as you have so often repeated to me to-day."
"Wretched woman!" screamed the lawyer, as he sprang at his wife, his fist raised in a paroxysm of rage.
"Father, recollect yourself, for pity!"
A moment later Desmarais's fury gave way to prostration. His features were overspread with an ashen pallor, he reeled, and had barely time to throw himself into an arm-chair, mumbling as if his senses had forsaken him—"I am lost!—The guillotine!"
Madam Desmarais and her daughter flew to the advocate's side, raised his inert head, and made him breathe their salts. Hardly had he come to himself when Gertrude entered and announced:
"Monsieur Billaud-Varenne asks to speak with monsieur, on a very urgent matter."