“But how can you expect me to pity a form of misery of which the joys to me would seem cheaply purchased with my whole fortune!” exclaimed the Count, taking his hand out of his pocket empty of the notes which Bianchon had supposed his patron to be feeling for. “That woman feels, she is alive! Would not Louis XV. have given his kingdom to rise from the grave and have three days of youth and life! And is not that the history of thousands of dead men, thousands of sick men, thousands of old men?”
“Poor Caroline!” cried Bianchon.
As he heard the name the Count shuddered, and grasped the doctor’s arm with the grip of an iron vise, as it seemed to Bianchon.
“Her name is Caroline Crochard?” asked the President, in a voice that was evidently broken.
“Then you know her?” said the doctor, astonished.
“And the wretch’s name is Solvet.—Ay, you have kept your word!” exclaimed Granville; “you have roused my heart to the most terrible pain it can suffer till it is dust. That emotion, too, is a gift from hell, and I always know how to pay those debts.”
By this time the Count and the doctor had reached the corner of the Rue de la Chaussee d’Antin. One of those night-birds who wonder round with a basket on their back and crook in hand, and were, during the Revolution, facetiously called the Committee of Research, was standing by the curbstone where the two men now stopped. This scavenger had a shriveled face worthy of those immortalized by Charlet in his caricatures of the sweepers of Paris.
“Do you ever pick up a thousand-franc note?”
“Now and then, master.”
“And you restore them?”