For the last two months the position of Theodose was acquiring the strength of a detached fort.

But Cerizet and Dutocq held it undermined by a mass of powder, with the match ever lighted; but the wind might extinguish the match or the devil might flood the mine.
The moment when wild beasts seize their food is always the most critical, and that moment had now arrived for these three hungry tigers.
Cerizet would sometimes say to Theodose, with that revolutionary glance which twice in this century sovereigns have had to meet:-- "I have made you king, and here am I still nothing! for it is nothing not to be all." A reaction of envy was rushing its avalanche through Cerizet.

Dutocq was at the mercy of his copying clerk.

Theodose would gladly have burned his copartners could he have burned their papers in the same conflagration.
All three studied each other too carefully, in order to conceal their own thoughts, not to be in turn divined.

Theodose lived a life of three hells as he thought of what lay below the cards, then of his own game, and then of his future.