The servants trembled for an instant with joy.

The vengeance they had called down upon these men had come.
But their joy was driven back within their souls by a terrible fear; the gendarmes were still heard coming and going in the garrets.
The _spy_--noun of strength, under which all shades of the police are confounded, for the public has never chosen to specify in language the varieties of those who compose this dispensary of social remedies so essential to all governments--the spy has this curious and magnificent quality: he never becomes angry; he possesses the Christian humility of a priest; his eyes are stolid with an indifference which he holds as a barrier against the world of fools who do not understand him; his forehead is adamant under insult; he pursues his ends like a reptile whose carapace is fractured only by a cannonball; but (like that reptile) he is all the more furious when the blow does reach him, because he believed his armor invulnerable.

The lash of the whip upon his fingers was to Corentin, pain apart, the cannonball that cracked the shell.

Coming from that magnificent and noble girl, this action, emblematic of her disgust, humiliated him, not only in the eyes of the people about him, but in his own.
Peyrade sprang to the hearth, caught Laurence's foot, raised it, and compelled her, out of modesty, to throw herself on the sofa, where she had lately lain asleep.

The scene, like other contrasts in human things, was burlesque in the midst of terror.