He will be presented to me to-morrow. To-
morrow, also, between three and four, I shall be at the house of a
man who can perhaps discover Pascal's hiding-place for me,--the
house of M. Isidore Fortunat. I hope to make my escape easily
enough, for at that same hour, Madame Leon has an appointment with
the Marquis de Valorsay."
X.
The old legend of Achilles's heel will be eternally true. A man
may be humble or powerful, feeble or strong, but there are none of
us without some weak spot in our armor, a spot vulnerable beyond
all others, a certain place where wounds prove most dangerous and
painful. M. Isidore Fortunat's weak place was his cash-box. To
attack him there was to endanger his life--to wound him at a point
where all his sensibility centred. For it was in this cash-box
and not in his breast that his heart really throbbed. His safe
made him happy or dejected. Happy when it was filled to
overflowing by some brilliant operation, and dejected when he saw
it become empty as some imprudent transaction failed.
This then explains his frenzy on that ill-fated Sunday, when,
after being brutally dismissed by M. Wilkie, he returned to his
rooms in the company of his clerk, Victor Chupin. This explains,
too, the intensity of the hatred he now felt for the Marquis de
Valorsay and the Viscount de Coralth. The former, the marquis,
had defrauded him of forty thousand francs in glittering gold.
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