young Maurice d’Esparvieu? I can put your mind at rest on that point. You are, and all Paris knows it. But it is not to avenge your personal affronts that you are on the Bench.”
“Monsieur le Garde des Sceaux,” murmured the Judge, nearly apoplectic and in a choked voice. “I am an honest man.”
“You are a fool . . . and a provincial. Listen to me; if Maurice d’Esparvieu and Mademoiselle Bouchotte are not released within half an hour I will crush you like a piece of glass. Be off!”
Monsieur René d’Esparvieu went himself to fetch his son from the Conciergerie and took him back to the old house in the Rue Garancière. The return was triumphant. The news had been disseminated that Maurice had with generous imprudence interested himself in an attempt to restore the monarchy, and that Judge Salneuve, the infamous freemason, the tool of Combes and André, had tried to compromise the young man by making him out to be an accomplice of a band of criminals.
That was what Abbé Patouille seemed to think, and he answered for Maurice as for himself. It was known, moreover, that breaking with his father, who had rallied to the support of the Republic, young d’Esparvieu was on the high road to becoming an out-and-out Royalist. The people who had an inside knowledge of things
