M. Ginory turned around in his chair, leaned back, and said in a caustic tone: "Truly, Monsieur, you certainly ought to complete your information and not make an enigma of your deposition. I do not understand this useless reticence, and moral debts, to use your words; they are only to gain time. What, then, was M. Rovère's past?"
Dantin hesitated a moment; not very long. Then he firmly said: "That, Monsieur le Juge, is a secret confided to me by my friend, and as it has nothing to do with this matter, I ask you to refrain from questioning me about it."
"I beg your pardon," the magistrate replied. "There is not, there cannot be a secret for an Examining Magistrate. In Rovère's interests, whose memory ought to have public vindication, yes, in his interests, and I ought to say also in your own, it is necessary that you should state explicitly what you have just alluded to. You tell me that there is a secret. I wish to know it."
"It is the confidence of a dead person, Monsieur," Dantin replied, in vibrating tones.
"There are no confidences when justice is in the balance."
"But it is also the secret of a living person," said Jacques Dantin.
"Is it of yourself of whom you speak?"
He gazed keenly at the face, now tortured and contracted.
Dantin replied: "No, I do not speak of myself, but of another."
"That other—who is he?"