For instance, we have seen that he was always beside the truth in his discoveries. He had assumed innumerable disguises and invented a thousand time-worn methods of watching what was taking place at Villa Palmarosa; and he was thoroughly persuaded that Michel was the princess's lover. He was a hundred leagues from suspecting the nature of the tie between them. He might easily have deceived Doctor Recuperati, whose unswerving uprightness lacked foresight and intelligence; and yet, desiring to steal the will from him, he had delayed from day to day, and had never succeeded in gaining his confidence in the slightest degree. It was impossible for him to play for five minutes the rôle of a well-meaning man, his face bore so unmistakably the stamp of unalloyed and unbounded baseness. His vices embarrassed him, as he himself admitted, even proclaimed, when he was intoxicated. Dissolute, avaricious, and so intemperate that he fuddled his brain when lucidity was most essential to him, he had conducted a difficult intrigue to a successful end. The cardinal had for a long time made use of him as a police agent for whom no task was too vile, and he had never valued him except as a tool of the lowest order. In his days of cynical wit, the prelate had branded him with an epithet which we shall not attempt to translate, and from which he had never been able to rise. Thus he had had no share in the family affairs and secrets of State which had filled the life of Monsignor Hieronymo. The contempt which he inspired in his master had survived his loss of memory, and the aged prelate, paralyzed and almost in his dotage, was not even afraid of him, and recovered the power of speech with him only to call him by the degrading sobriquet which he had previously bestowed on him. Another proof of the abbé's idiocy was his cherished conviction that he could seduce all the women who aroused his desires. "With a little money and a lot of lies," he would say, "with threats, compliments and promises, a man can obtain the proudest or the humblest of them." Consequently he flattered himself that he could obtain a share of Agatha's fortune by effecting the removal of the man whom he presumed to be her lover. He was capable of but one thing, of placing Michel at the muzzle of a bandit's gun, and shouting _fire_! in a moment of disappointed vanity and greed; he would not have dared to kill him himself, just as he would not have dared to do violence to Mila, if she had threatened him with nothing more than a pair of scissors.