"The iron's in the fire now!" he thought to himself as he watched his
giddy prey on her way home.



CHAPTER VI

A KEYNOTE

When Theodose reached home he found, waiting for him on the landing, a
personage who is, as it were, the submarine current of this history;
he will be found within it like some buried church on which has risen
the facade of a palace. The sight of this man, who, after vainly
ringing at la Peyrade's door, was now trying that of Dutocq, made the
Provencal barrister tremble--but secretly, within himself, not
betraying externally his inward emotion. This man was Cerizet, whom
Dutocq had mentioned to Thuillier as his copying-clerk.

Cerizet was only thirty-eight years old, but he looked a man of fifty,
so aged had he become from causes which age all men. His hairless head
had a yellow skull, ill-covered by a rusty, discolored wig; the mask
of his face, pale, flabby, and unnaturally rough, seemed the more
horrible because the nose was eaten away, though not sufficiently to
admit of its being replaced by a false one. From the spring of this
nose at the forehead, down to the nostrils, it remained as nature had
made it; but disease, after gnawing away the sides near the
extremities, had left two holes of fantastic shape, which vitiated
pronunciation and hampered speech. The eyes, originally handsome, but
weakened by misery of all kinds and by sleepless nights, were red
around the edges, and deeply sunken; the glance of those eyes, when