However ill you may be, you must have the courage to come here to-morrow; find strength in your love for me. Mine for you has induced me to submit to a cruel operation, and I cannot leave my bed. I have had the actual cautery applied to my back, and it was necessary to burn it in a long time; you understand me? But I thought of you, and I did not suffer.
"To baffle Maulincour (who will not persecute us much longer), I have left the protecting roof of the embassy, and am now safe from all inquiry in the rue des Enfants-Rouges, number 12, with an old woman, Madame Etienne Gruget, mother of that Ida, who shall pay dear for her folly. Come to-morrow, at nine in the morning. I am in a room which is reached only by an interior staircase. Ask for Monsieur Camuset. Adieu; I kiss your forehead, my darling."
Jacquet looked at Jules with a sort of honest terror, the sign of a true compassion, as he made his favorite exclamation in two separate and distinct tones,--"The deuce! the deuce!"
"That seems clear to you, doesn't it?" said Jules. "Well, in the depths of my heart there is a voice that pleads for my wife, and makes itself heard above the pangs of jealousy. I must endure the worst of all agony until to-morrow; but to-morrow, between nine and ten I shall know all; I shall be happy or wretched for all my life. Think of me then, Jacquet."
"I shall be at your house to-morrow at eight o'clock. We will go together; I'll wait for you, if you like, in the street. You may run some danger, and you ought to have near you some devoted person who'll understand a mere sign, and whom you can safely trust. Count on me."
"Even to help me in killing some one?"
"The deuce! the deuce!" said Jacquet, repeating, as it were, the same musical note. "I have two children and a wife."
Jules pressed his friend's hand and went away; but returned immediately.
"I forgot the letter," he said. "But that's not all, I must reseal it."
"The deuce! the deuce! you opened it without saving the seal; however, it is still possible to restore it. Leave it with me and I'll bring it to you /secundum scripturam/."
"At what time?"
"Half-past five."
"If I am not yet in, give it to the porter and tell him to send it up to madame."
"Do you want me to-morrow?"
"No. Adieu."
Jules drove at once to the place de la Rotonde du Temple, where he left his cabriolet and went on foot to the rue des Enfants-Rouges. He found the house of Madame Etienne Gruget and examined it. There, the mystery on which depended the fate of so many persons would be cleared up; there, at this moment, was Ferragus, and to Ferragus all the threads of this strange plot led. The Gordian knot of the drama, already so bloody, was surely in a meeting between Madame Jules, her husband, and that man; and a blade able to cut the closest of such knots would not be wanting.
The house was one of those which belong to the class called /cabajoutis/. This significant name is given by the populace of Paris to houses which are built, as it were, piecemeal. They are nearly always composed of buildings originally separate but afterwards united according to the fancy of the various proprietors who successively enlarge them; or else they are houses begun, left unfinished, again built upon, and completed,--unfortunate structures which have passed, like certain peoples, under many dynasties of capricious masters.
Neither the floors nor the windows have an /ensemble/,--to borrow one of the most picturesque terms of the art of painting; all is discord, even the external decoration. The /cabajoutis/ is to Parisian architecture what the /capharnaum/ is to the apartment,--a poke-hole, where the most heterogeneous articles are flung pell-mell.
"Madame Etienne?" asked Jules of the portress.
This portress had her lodge under the main entrance, in a sort of chicken coop, or wooden house on rollers, not unlike those sentry-boxes which the police have lately set up by the stands of hackney-coaches.
"Hein?" said the portress, without laying down the stocking she was knitting.
In Paris the various component parts which make up the physiognomy of any given portion of the monstrous city, are admirably in keeping with its general character. Thus porter, concierge, or Suisse, whatever name may be given to that essential muscle of the Parisian monster, is always in conformity with the neighborhood of which he is a part; in fact, he is often an epitome of it. The lazy porter of the faubourg Saint-Germain, with lace on every seam of his coat, dabbles in stocks; he of the Chaussee d'Antin takes his ease, reads the money-articles in the newspapers, and has a business of his own in the faubourg Montmartre. The portress in the quarter of prostitution was formerly a prostitute; in the Marais, she has morals, is cross-grained, and full of crotchets.
On seeing Monsieur Jules this particular portress, holding her knitting in one hand, took a knife and stirred the half-extinguished peat in her foot-warmer; then she said:--"You want Madame Etienne; do you mean Madame Etienne Gruget?"
"Yes," said Jules, assuming a vexed air.
"Who makes trimmings?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, monsieur," she said, issuing from her cage, and laying her hand on Jules' arm and leading him to the end of a long passage-way, vaulted like a cellar, "go up the second staircase at the end of the court-yard--where you will see the windows with the pots of pinks; that's where Madame Etienne lives."
"Thank you, madame. Do you think she is alone?"
"Why shouldn't she be alone? she's a widow."
Jules hastened up a dark stairway, the steps of which were knobby with hardened mud left by the feet of those who came and went. On the second floor he saw three doors but no signs of pinks. Fortunately, on one of the doors, the oiliest and darkest of the three, he read these words, chalked on a panel: "Ida will come to-night at nine o'clock."
"This is the place," thought Jules.
