“You are right, Worms,” said the inspector of fine arts. “You are perfectly right. The Greeks are not interesting, for they are poor. They have nothing but their blue sea, their violet hills and the fragments of their statues. The honey of Hymettus is never quoted on the Bourse. The Turks, on the contrary, are well worthy of the attention of European financiers. They have internal dissensions; above all they have resources. They pay badly and they pay much. One can do business with them. Stocks rise. All is well then. Such are the ideals of our foreign policy!” M. Worms-Clavelin interrupted him hurriedly, and casting on him a reproachful look, said: “Ah, now! Georges, don’t be disingenuous. You know well enough that we neither have, nor can have, any foreign policy.” XI “It seems that it is fixed for to-morrow,” said M. de Terremondre as he entered Paillot’s shop. Everyone understood the allusion: he was referring to the execution of Lecœur, the butcher’s assistant, who had been sentenced to death on the 27th of November, for the murder of Madame Houssieu. This young criminal supplied the entire township with an interest in life. Judge Roquincourt, who had a reputation in society as a ladies’ man, had courteously admitted Madame Dellion and Madame de Gromance to the prison and allowed them a glimpse of the prisoner through the barred grating of the cell where he was playing cards with a gaoler. In his turn, the governor of the prison, M. Ossian Colot, an officer of the Academy, gladly did the honours of his condemned prisoner to journalists as well as to prominent townsmen. M. Ossian Colot had written with the knowledge of an expert on various questions of the penal code. He was proud of his establishment, which was run on the most up-to-date lines, and he by no means despised popularity. The visitors cast curious glances at Lecœur, while they speculated on the relationship between this youth of twenty and the nonagenarian widow who had become his victim. They stood stupefied by astonishment before this monstrous brute. Yet Abbé Tabarit, the prison chaplain, told with tears in his eyes how the poor lad had expressed the most edifying sentiments of repentance and piety. Meanwhile, from morning to night throughout three whole months, Lecœur played cards with his gaolers and disputed the points in their own slang, for they were of the same class. His darkened soul never revealed its sufferings in words, but the rosy, chubby lad who, only ten months before, was to be met whistling in the street with his basket on his head, and his white apron knotted round his muscular loins, now shivered in his strait waistcoat with pale, cadaverous face and looked like a sick man of forty. His herculean neck was wasted and now protruded from his drooping shoulders, thin and disproportionately long. By this time it was agreed on all sides that he had exhausted the abhorrence, the pity and the curiosity of his fellow-citizens, and that it was high time to