severely, and the nervous shock of the sudden surprise gave him a
fever. He did not, therefore, go to see Madame Jules.

Ten days after this event, he left the house for the first time, in
his repaired cabriolet, when, as he drove down the rue de Bourgogne
and was close to the sewer opposite to the Chamber of Deputies, the
axle-tree broke in two, and the baron was driving so rapidly that the
breakage would have caused the two wheels to come together with force
enough to break his head, had it not been for the resistance of the
leather hood. Nevertheless, he was badly wounded in the side. For the
second time in ten days he was carried home in a fainting condition to
his terrified grandmother. This second accident gave him a feeling of
distrust; he thought, though vaguely, of Ferragus and Madame Jules. To
throw light on these suspicions he had the broken axle brought to his
room and sent for his carriage-maker. The man examined the axle and
the fracture, and proved two things: First, the axle was not made in
his workshop; he furnished none that did not bear the initials of his
name on the iron. But he could not explain by what means this axle had
been substituted for the other. Secondly, the breakage of the
suspicious axle was caused by a hollow space having been blown in it
and a straw very cleverly inserted.

"Eh! Monsieur le baron, whoever did that was malicious!" he said; "any
one would swear, to look at it, that the axle was sound."

Monsieur de Maulincour begged the carriage-maker to say nothing of the
affair; but he felt himself warned. These two attempts at murder were
planned with an ability which denoted the enmity of intelligent minds.

"It is war to the death," he said to himself, as he tossed in his bed,