One can imagine now the shock that it caused him, as he sat at work one afternoon in his little study, littered with books and pamphlets, when the maid handed him a card on which he read: "Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp." Fate, which is wont to teach such lessons, brought those two men face to face, who were born and reared under such widely different conditions, and who were undergoing, unknown to each other, the same universal ordeal of heredity, whereof one of the ancients said: "We shall be punished, either in our own persons or in those of our descendants, for the sins we have committed in this world." This is the principle, at once mysterious and natural, moral and physiological, which, by uniting persons of the same blood, creates the Family and Society. Pierre's first impulse--so intolerable to him was the thought of his father's possible shame--was to reply: "I am not at home;" the second, to say: "Show him in." For the very reason that he was ignorant of the real reason for the dismissal of the steward of the Claviers-Grandchamps, he was unwilling to appear to dread a conversation with the future head of that house, and he thought:-- "What does he want of me? Doubtless he has come on account of the will. He is going to ask me not to mention what I may have heard and guessed. Those people have no appreciation of the honor of the medical profession. Bah! the honor of a bourgeois in the eyes of a noble!--A noble?" He laughed sneeringly,--"and of an officer with such ideas as this incompetent has, and as he exhibited in that stupid business of the inventory!" As will be seen, his customary surly humor had already returned to this strange creature, who had always taken life against the grain, if we may so express it, because of his false position on the edge of a society in which he had no well-defined place. The result was that on entering that little room, the aspect of which disclosed the professional and intellectual ardor of its tenant, Landri de Claviers encountered the same armed glance that he had always known, behind the young scientist's gold-bowed spectacles. With his red beard and his irregular features, as if carved by a bill-hook, which gave him the aspect of a Tartar, the younger Chaffin really had, at that moment, the look of a very evil-minded man. This sensation was calculated to impart and did in fact impart a dryness, almost a bitterness of accent to Landri's first words, which were destined instantly to transform that conversation into a brief and fierce duel. "I shall not detain you long," he began, after they had exchanged a few words of ordinary courtesy. Because of their former companionship and their difference in rank, they never knew how to address each other. They never called each other "monsieur," or by their names simply. "I have come upon a delicate, a very delicate errand. But the question I have come to ask is not put to the man, but to the physician who attended Monsieur Jaubourg."