The great man tossed aside his pen, and rose as the door closed after the entering visitor. Pushing his horn-rimmed spectacles up on to his forehead he stretched out his hand to La Boulaye. “It is you, Caron,” he murmured in that plaintive voice of his. It was a voice that sorted well with the humane man who had resigned a judgeship at Arras sooner than pass a death-sentence, but hardly so well with him who, as Public Prosecutor in Paris, had brought some hundreds of heads to the sawdust. “I have been desiring to congratulate you upon your victory of yesterday,” he continued, “even as I have been congratulating myself upon the fact that it was I who found you and gave you to the Nation. I feared that I might not see you ere I left.” “You are leaving Paris?” asked La Boulaye, without heeding the compliments in the earlier part of the other's speech. “For a few days. Business of the Nation, my friend. But you--let us talk of you. Do you know that I am proud of you, cher Caron? Your eloquence turned Danton green with jealousy, and as for poor Vergniaud, it extinguished him utterly. Ma foi! If you continue as you have begun, the day may not be far distant when you will become the patron and I the Protege.” And his weak eyes beamed pleasantly from out of that unhealthy pale face. Outwardly he had changed little since his first coming to Paris, to represent the Third Estate of Artoise, saving, his cheeks were grown more hollow. Upon his dress he still bestowed the same unpretentious care that had always characterised it, which, in one of the most prominent patriots of the Mountain, amounted almost to foppishness. Blue coat, white waistcoat, silk hose and shoes buckled with silver, gave him an elegant exterior that must have earned him many a covert sneer from his colleagues. His sloping forehead was crowned by a periwig, sedulously curled and powdered--for all that with the noblesse this was already a discarded fashion. La Boulaye replied to his patron's compliments with the best grace he could command considering how full of another matter was his mind. “I may congratulate myself, Maximilien,” he added, “upon my good fortune in coming before you took your departure. I have a request to prefer, a favour to ask.” “Tut! Who talks of favours? Not you, Caron, I hope. You have but to name what you desire, and so that it lies within my power to accord it, the thing is yours.” “There is a prisoner in the Luxembourg in whom I am interested. I seek his enlargement.” “But is that all?” cried the little man, and, without more ado, he turned to his writing-table and drew a printed form from among the chaos of documents. “His name?” he asked indifferently, as he dipped his quill in the ink-horn and scratched his signature at the foot of it. “An aristocrat,” said Caron, with some slight hesitancy.