The hilt of this dagger was the ingratitude of Pelisson, Gaillard & Co.—the men who had been his guests, to whom he had lent money, and who had now stabbed him in this cruel manner before all Paris. Little did he know of the raving Pelisson, who, having sought vainly for Froissart, had returned by the night mail, which stops at Amiens and arrives in Paris at seven in the morning, only to find this horrible snake curled in _Pantin_. Pelisson at this moment was dragging the terrified Gaillard out of bed, who was protesting that he knew nothing of the matter, just as Scribe ten minutes ago had protested that eighteen thousand francs were missing from the safe, he could not tell how; and as Saxe, the German foreman, had declared that the usual big edition of _Pantin_ was out, and could not be got back, not if God came out of Himmel, and that it was not Saxe’s fault that this _schweinhund_ article had crawled into print—whilst Struve, whose practical joke had long ago laid the seeds of all this mischief, was the only man unconcerned by it as he lay asleep after a hard night’s work, and dreaming of stained-glass windows and saints who had strayed into art. But Toto knew nothing of all this: he thought this cruel and spiteful trick the work of his friends. He had always liked Pelisson, and he had liked Gaillard. Gaillard had been, in fact, a kind of necessity to him—a sort of dry-nurse, who wiped his nose and said “There, there!” when he was fretful, and listened to his secrets, and told him tales, and put him up to resist his mother. A man of the world would have seen at once that some trick had been played on _Pantin_. Pelisson, of all men in the world, was the last to let such an article appear in his paper; especially as it was leveled against a man who was virtually part proprietor. Gaillard, too, was entirely out of court. But Toto was not a man of the world, and the bitterest thing to him in this severe humiliation was the supposed authorship. He took up _Pantin_, folded it, and hid it under one of the cushions of the couch. The act, performed on the impulse of a moment, revealed to him in a dramatic manner his position. Of what use was the hiding of one copy of _Pantin_ under a cushion when fifty thousand _Pantins_ were bellowing his shame all over Paris? So he snatched it out and flung it open on the table as if for everyone to read—a useless act, for everyone was reading it. Then he smoked a cigarette. In an hour of semi-delirium he smoked ten. The thing was so immensely vile, so wanton, such bad form, that the very enormity of it calmed him. A man who learns that the bank has smashed, that his wife has eloped, and that his house is burnt to the ground all at the same moment, ten to one receives the news with calmness—the blow stuns him. He feels that Fate and Death and other heroic personages have condescended to turn their undivided attention for a moment to his affairs—he is almost a hero, in fact.