“I have made you king, and here am I still nothing! for it is nothing not to be all.”
A reaction of envy was rushing its avalanche through Cerizet. Dutocq was at the mercy of his copying clerk. Theodose would gladly have burned his copartners could he have burned their papers in the same conflagration. All three studied each other too carefully, in order to conceal their own thoughts, not to be in turn divined. Theodose lived a life of three hells as he thought of what lay below the cards, then of his own game, and then of his future. His speech to Thuillier was a cry of despair; he threw his lead into the waters of the old bourgeois and found there nothing more than twenty-five thousand francs.
“And,” he said to himself as he went to his own room, “possibly nothing at all a month hence.”
He new felt the deepest hatred to the Thuilliers. But Thuillier himself he held by a harpoon stuck into the depths of the man’s vanity; namely, by the projected work, entitled “Taxation and the Sinking Fund,” for which he intended to rearrange the ideas of the Saint-Simonian “Globe,” giving them a systematic form, and coloring them with his fervid Southern diction. Thuillier’s bureaucratic knowledge of the subject would be of use to him here. Theodose therefore clung to this rope, resolving to do battle, on so poor a base of operations, with the vanity of a fool, which, according to individual character, is either granite or sand. On reflection, Theodose was inclined to be content with the prospect.
On the evening before the right of redemption expired, Claparon and Cerizet proceeded to manipulate the notary in the following manner. Cerizet, to whom Claparon had revealed the password and the notary’s retreat, went out to this hiding-place to say to the latter:—
“One of my friends, Claparon, whom you know, has asked me to come and see you; he will expect you to-morrow, in the evening, you know where. He has the paper you expect from him, which he will exchange with you for the ten thousand agreed upon; but I must be present, for five thousand of that sum belong to me; and I warn you, my dear monsieur, that the name in the counter-deed is in blank.”
“I shall be there,” replied the ex-notary.
The poor devil waited the whole night in agonies of mind that can well be imagined, for safety or inevitable ruin were in the balance. At sunrise he saw approaching him, instead of Claparon, a bailiff of the Court of commerce, who produced a judgment against him in regular form, and informed him that he must go with him to Clichy.
Cerizet had made an arrangement with one of the creditors of the luckless notary, pledging himself to deliver up the debtor on payment to himself of half the debt. Out of the ten thousand francs promised to Claparon, the victim of this trap was obliged, in order to obtain his liberty, to pay six thousand down, the amount of his debt.
On receiving his share of this extortion Cerizet said to himself: “There’s three thousand to make Cerizet clear out.”