With Albert, he became kind and friendly, and full of the liveliest compassion. Unfortunate man! how greatly he must suffer, he whose whole life had been like one long enchantment. How at a single blow everything about him had fallen in ruins. Who could have foreseen all this at the time when he was the one hope of a wealthy and illustrious house! Recalling the past, the magistrate pictured to him the most touching reminiscences of his early youth, and stirred up the ashes of all his extinct affections. Taking advantage of all that he knew of the prisoner’s life, he tortured him by the most mournful allusions to Claire. Why did he persist in bearing alone his great misfortune? Had he no one in the world who would deem it happiness to share his sufferings? Why this morose silence? Should he not rather hasten to reassure her whose very life depended upon his? What was necessary for that? A single word. Then he would be, if not free, at least returned to the world. His prison would become a habitable abode, no more solitary confinement; his friends would visit him, he might receive whomsoever he wished to see. It was no longer the magistrate who spoke; it was a father, who, no matter what happens, always keeps in the recesses of his heart, the greatest indulgence for his child. M. Daburon did even more. For a moment he imagined himself in Albert’s position. What would he have done after the terrible revelation? He scarcely dared ask himself. He understood the motive which prompted the murder of Widow Lerouge; he could explain it to himself; he could almost excuse it. (Another trap.) It was certainly a great crime, but in no way revolting to conscience or to reason. It was one of those crimes which society might, if not forget, at least forgive up to a certain point, because the motive was not a shameful one. What tribunal would fail to find extenuating circumstances for a moment of frenzy so excusable. Besides was not the Count de Commarin the more guilty of the two? Was it not his folly that prepared the way for this terrible event? His son was the victim of fatality, and was in the highest degree to be pitied. M. Daburon spoke for a long time upon this text, seeking those things most suitable in his opinion to soften the hardened heart of an assassin. And he arrived always at the same conclusion,--the wisdom of confessing. But he wasted his eloquence precisely as M. Tabaret had wasted his. Albert appeared in no way affected. His answers were of the shortest. He began and ended as on the first occasion, by protesting his innocence. One test, which has often given the desired result, still remained to be tried.