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,
--"a war of savages, skulking in ambush, of trickery and treachery,
declared in the name of Madame Jules. What sort of man is this to whom
she belongs? What species of power does this Ferragus wield?"

Monsieur de Maulincour, though a soldier and brave man, could not
repress a shudder. In the midst of many thoughts that now assailed
him, there was one against which he felt he had neither defence nor
courage: might not poison be employed ere long by his secret enemies?
Under the influence of fears, which his momentary weakness and fever
and low diet increased, he sent for an old woman long attached to the
service of his grandmother, whose affection for himself was one of
those semi-maternal sentiments which are the sublime of the
commonplace. Without confiding in her wholly, he charged her to buy
secretly and daily, in different localities, the food he needed;