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"Do you know, monsieur, that I am lawyer to the Countess Ferraud," he said, interrupting the speaker, "Colonel Chabert's widow?" "My wife yes monsieur. Therefore, after a hundred fruitless attempts to interest lawyers, who have all thought me mad, I made up my mind to come to you.
On returning to his office, he sent Godeschal, at that time his second clerk, to the Comtesse Ferraud, who, on reading the note, at once paid the sum due to Comte Chabert's lawyer. In 1840, towards the end of June, Godeschal, now himself an attorney, went to Ris with Derville, to whom he had succeeded.
Many experiments, as to the extent to which the human frame could bear heat, without the destruction of the vital powers, have been tried from time to time; but so far as recollection serves, Monsieur Chabert's fire-resisting qualities are greater than those professed by individuals who, before him, have undergone this species of ordeal."
For the last few days it has been as hot here as Nebuchadnezzar's furnace or Monsieur Chabert's oven, the sun glaring down from a copper sky upon these naked, treeless streets, in traversing which one is tempted to adopt the language of a warm-weather poet: "The lean, like walking skeletons, go stalking pale and gloomy; The fat, like red-hot warming-pans, send hotter fancies through me; I wake from dreams of polar ice, on which I've been a slider, Like fishes dreaming of the sea and waking in the spider."
Romanesco ran a faro bank in his apartments, and certainly cheated, for he nearly always won; it was not long, therefore, before other people in good society at Lucca shared Madame von Chabert's suspicions, and, consequently, Romanesco thought it advisable to vanish as suddenly from Lucca as Escovedo had done from Vevey, and without leaving any more traces behind him.
At the time of Comte Chabert's death, M. Ferraud was a young man of six-and-twenty, without a fortune, of pleasing appearance, who had had his successes, and whom the Faubourg Saint-Germain had adopted as doing it credit; but Madame la Comtesse Chabert had managed to turn her share of her husband's fortune to such good account that, after eighteen months of widowhood, she had about forty thousand francs a year.
To give herself a minute's reprieve she went up to her room, sat down before her writing-table, and laid aside the mask of composure which she wore in Chabert's presence, like an actress who, returning to her dressing-room after a fatiguing fifth act, drops half dead, leaving with the audience an image of herself which she no longer resembles.
On the first return of the King, Comte Ferraud had begun to regret his marriage. Colonel Chabert's widow had not been the means of allying him to anybody; he was alone and unsupported in steering his way in a course full of shoals and beset by enemies.
Then she shook off her shame, and retorted with the natural impertinence of such women, "Since you are the so-called Chabert's attorney, be so good as to " "Madame," said Derville, "I am at this moment as much your lawyer as I am Colonel Chabert's. Do you suppose I want to lose so valuable a client as you are? But you are not listening." "Nay, speak on, monsieur," said she graciously.
The following article, which appeared in the New York Herald of September 1st, 1859, three days after Chabert's death, gives further details of his activities in this country: We published among the obituary notices in yesterday's Herald the death of Dr. Julian Xavier Chabert, the "Fire King," aged 67 years, of pulmonary consumption. Dr.
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