name, no matter what, and should, perhaps, have been made
Field-Marshal in Austria or Russia. Who knows?"

"Monsieur," said the attorney, "you have upset all my ideas. I feel as
if I heard you in a dream. Pause for a moment, I beg of you."

"You are the only person," said the Colonel, with a melancholy look,
"who ever listened to me so patiently. No lawyer has been willing to
lend me ten napoleons to enable me to procure from Germany the
necessary documents to begin my lawsuit--"

"What lawsuit?" said the attorney, who had forgotten his client's
painful position in listening to the narrative of his past sufferings.

"Why, monsieur, is not the Comtesse Ferraud my wife? She has thirty
thousand francs a year, which belong to me, and she will not give me a
son. When I tell lawyers these things--men of sense; when I propose
--I, a beggar--to bring action against a Count and Countess; when I--a
dead man--bring up as against a certificate of death a certificate of
marriage and registers of births, they show me out, either with the
air of cold politeness, which you all know how to assume to rid
yourself of a hapless wretch, or brutally, like men who think they
have to deal with a swindler or a madman--it depends on their nature.
I have been buried under the dead; but now I am buried under the
living, under papers, under facts, under the whole of society, which
wants to shove me underground again!"

"Pray resume your narrative," said Derville.

"'Pray resume it!'" cried the hapless old man, taking the young