“Have you any message, madame, for M. Leboeuf? I am taking the train to Mantes.”
“Yes. Wait a moment, and I will write to ask him to dine with us to-morrow. I want to see him, so that he may act in concert to repair the injustice to which you have fallen a victim.”
The Presidente left the room. Fraisier saw himself a justice of the peace. He felt transformed at the thought; he grew stouter; his lungs were filled with the breath of success, the breeze of prosperity. He dipped into the mysterious reservoirs of volition for fresh and strong doses of the divine essence. To reach success, he felt, as Remonencq half felt, that he was ready for anything, for crime itself, provided that no proofs of it remained. He had faced the Presidente boldly; he had transmuted conjecture into reality; he had made assertions right and left, all to the end that she might authorize him to protect her interests and win her influence. As he stood there, he represented the infinite misery of two lives, and the no less boundless desires of two men. He spurned the squalid horrors of the Rue de la Perle. He saw the glitter of a thousand crowns in fees from La Cibot, and five thousand francs from the Presidente. This meant an abode such as befitted his future prospects. Finally, he was repaying Dr. Poulain.
There are hard, ill-natured beings, goaded by distress or disease into active malignity, that yet entertain diametrically opposed sentiments with a like degree of vehemence. If Richelieu was a good hater, he was no less a good friend. Fraisier, in his gratitude, would have let himself be cut in two for Poulain.
So absorbed was he in these visions of a comfortable and prosperous life, that he did not see the Presidente come in with the letter in her hand, and she, looking at him, thought him less ugly now than at first. He was about to be useful to her, and as soon as a tool belongs to us we look upon it with other eyes.
“M. Fraisier,” said she, “you have convinced me of your intelligence, and I think that you can speak frankly.”
Fraisier replied by an eloquent gesture.
“Very well,” continued the lady, “I must ask you to give a candid reply to this question: Are we, either of us, M. de Marville or I, likely to be compromised, directly or indirectly, by your action in this matter?”
“I would not have come to you, madame, if I thought that some day I should have to reproach myself for bringing so much as a splash of mud upon you, for in your position a speck the size of a pin’s head is seen by all the world. You forget, madame, that I must satisfy you if I am to be a justice of the peace in Paris. I have received one lesson at the outset of my life; it was so sharp that I do not care to lay myself open to a second thrashing. To sum it up in a last word, madame, I will not take a step in which you are indirectly involved without previously consulting you—”
“Very good. Here is the letter. And now I shall expect to be informed of the exact value of the estate.”