“Would you live in my position, knowing yourself within range of a cannon loaded with grape-shot, without feeling a strong desire to get out of it? Now listen to me carefully. You are doing a dangerous business, and you would be glad enough to have some solid protection in the very heart of the magistracy of Paris. If I can continue my present course, I shall be substitute attorney-general, possibly attorney-general, in three years. I offer you to-day the offices of a devoted friendship, which will serve you hereafter most assuredly, if only to replace you in a honorable position. Here are my conditions--” “Conditions!” exclaimed Cerizet. “In ten minutes I will bring you twenty-five thousand francs if you return to me all the notes which you have against me.” “But Dutocq? and Claparon?” said Cerizet. “Leave them in the lurch!” replied Theodose, with his lips at Cerizet’s ear. “That’s a pretty thing to say!” cried Cerizet. “And so you have invented this little game of hocus-pocus because you hold in your fingers fifteen thousand francs that don’t belong to you!” “But I’ve added ten thousand francs to them. Besides, you and I know each other.” “If you are able to get ten thousand francs out of your bourgeois you can surely get fifteen,” said Cerizet. “For thirty thousand I’m your man. Frankness for frankness, you know.” “You ask the impossible,” replied Theodose. “At this very moment, if you had to do with Claparon instead of with me, your fifteen thousand would be lost, for Thuillier is to-day the owner of that house.” “I’ll speak to Claparon,” said Cerizet, pretending to go and consult him, and mounting the stairs to the bedroom, from which Claparon had only just departed on his road to Havre. The two adversaries had been speaking, we should here remark, in a manner not to be overheard; and every time that Theodose raised his voice Cerizet would make a gesture, intimating that Claparon, from above, might be listening. The five minutes during which Theodose heard what seemed to be the murmuring of two voices were torture to him, for he had staked his very life upon the issue. Cerizet at last came down, with a smile upon his lips, his eyes sparkling with infernal mischief, his whole frame quivering in his joy, a Lucifer of gaiety! “I know nothing, so it seems!” he cried, shaking his shoulders, “but Claparon knows a great deal; he has worked with the big-wig bankers, and when I told what you wanted he began to laugh, and said, ‘I thought as much!’ You will have to bring me the twenty-five thousand you offer me to-morrow morning, my lad; and as much more before you can recover your notes.” “Why?” asked Theodose, feeling his spinal column liquidizing as if the discharge of some inward electric fluid had melted it. “The house is ours.” “How?”