“If he loses his head, what will become of him?--for the poor child has not Theodore’s tenacity,” said he to himself, as he lay down on the camp-bed--like a bed in a guard-room. A word must here be said about this Theodore, remembered by Jacques Collin at such a critical moment. Theodore Calvi, a young Corsican, imprisoned for life at the age of eighteen for eleven murders, thanks to the influential interference paid for with vast sums, had been made the fellow convict of Jacques Collin, to whom he was chained, in 1819 and 1820. Jacques Collin’s last escape, one of his finest inventions--for he had got out disguised as a gendarme leading Theodore Calvi as he was, a convict called before the commissary of police--had been effected in the seaport of Rochefort, where the convicts die by dozens, and where, it was hoped, these two dangerous rascals would have ended their days. Though they escaped together, the difficulties of their flight had forced them to separate. Theodore was caught and restored to the hulks. Indeed, a life with Lucien, a youth innocent of all crime, who had only minor sins on his conscience, dawned on him as bright and glorious as a summer sun; while with Theodore, Jacques Collin could look forward to no end but the scaffold after a career of indispensable crimes. The thought of disaster as a result of Lucien’s weakness--for his experience of an underground cell would certainly have turned his brain--took vast proportions in Jacques Collin’s mind; and, contemplating the probabilities of such a misfortune, the unhappy man felt his eyes fill with tears, a phenomenon that had been utterly unknown to him since his earliest childhood. “I must be in a furious fever,” said he to himself; “and perhaps if I send for the doctor and offer him a handsome sum, he will put me in communication with Lucien.” At this moment the turnkey brought in his dinner. “It is quite useless my boy; I cannot eat. Tell the governor of this prison to send the doctor to see me. I am very bad, and I believe my last hour has come.” Hearing the guttural rattle that accompanied these words, the warder bowed and went. Jacques Collin clung wildly to this hope; but when he saw the doctor and the governor come in together, he perceived that the attempt was abortive, and coolly awaited the upshot of the visit, holding out his wrist for the doctor to feel his pulse. “The Abbe is feverish,” said the doctor to Monsieur Gault, “but it is the type of fever we always find in inculpated prisoners--and to me,” he added, in the governor’s ear, “it is always a sign of some degree of guilt.” Just then the governor, to whom the public prosecutor had intrusted Lucien’s letter to be given to Jacques Collin, left the doctor and the prisoner together under the guard of the warder, and went to fetch the letter.