phrases, du Croisier groveled before him, like a Sganarelle before a
Geronte, begging the young Count in future to spare him the affront of

first depositing the amount of the bills which he should condescend to
draw. The concluding phrase seemed meant to convey the idea that here

was an open cashbox full of coin at the service of the noble
d'Esgrignon family. So strong was the impression that Victurnien, like

Sganarelle or Mascarille in the play, like everybody else who feels a
twinge of conscience at his finger-tips, made an involuntary gesture.

Now that he was sure of unlimited credit with the Kellers, he opened
Chesnel's letter gaily. He had expected four full pages, full of

expostulation to the brim; he glanced down the sheet for the familiar
words "prudence," "honor," "determination to do right," and the like,

and saw something else instead which made his head swim.
"MONSIEUR LE COMTE,--Of all my fortune I have now but two hundred

thousand francs left. I beg of you not to exceed that amount, if
you should do one of the most devoted servants of your family the

honor of taking it. I present my respects to you.
CHESNEL."

"He is one of Plutarch's men," Victurnien said to himself, as he
tossed the letter on the table. He felt chagrined; such magnanimity

made him feel very small.
"There! one must reform," he thought; and instead of going to a

restaurant and spending fifty or sixty francs over his dinner, he
retrenched by dining with the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and told her

about the letter.
"I should like to see that man," she said, letting her eyes shine like

two fixed stars.
"What would you do?"

"Why, he should manage my affairs for me."
Diane de Maufrigneuse was divinely dressed; she meant her toilet to do

honor to Victurnien. The levity with which she treated his affairs or,
more properlyspeaking, his debts fascinated him.

The charming pair went to the Italiens. Never had that beautiful and
enchanting woman looked more seraphic, more ethereal. Nobody in the

house could have believed that she had debts which reached the sum
total mentioned by de Marsay that very morning. No single one of the

cares of earth had touched that sublimeforehead of hers, full of
woman's pride of the highest kind. In her, a pensive air seemed to be

some gleam of an earthly love, nobly extinguished. The men for the
most part were wagering that Victurnien, with his handsome figure,

laid her under contribution; while the women, sure of their rival's
subterfuge, admired her as Michael Angelo admired Raphael, in petto.

Victurnien loved Diane, according to one of these ladies, for the sake
of her hair--she had the most beautiful fair hair in France; another

maintained that Diane's pallor was her principal merit, for she was
not really well shaped, her dress made the most of her figure; yet

others thought that Victurnien loved her for her foot, her one good
point, for she had a flat figure. But (and this brings the present-day

manner of Paris before you in an astonishing manner) whereas all the
men said that the Duchess was subsidizing Victurnien's splendor, the

women, on the other hand, gave people to understand that it was
Victurnien who paid for the angel's wings, as Rastignac said.

As they drove back again, Victurnien had it on the tip of his tongue a
score of times to open this chapter, for the Duchess' debts weighed

more heavily upon his mind than his own; and a score of times his
purpose died away before the attitude of the divine creature beside

him. He could see her by the light of the carriage lamps; she was
bewitching in the love-languor which always seemed to be extorted by

the violence of passion from her madonna's purity. The Duchess did not
fall into the mistake of talking of her virtue, of her angel's estate,

as provincial women, her imitators, do. She was far too clever. She
made him, for whom she made such great sacrifices, think these things

for himself. At the end of six months she could make him feel that a
harmless kiss on her hand was a deadly sin; she contrived that every

grace should be extorted from her, and this with such consummate art,
that it was impossible not to feel that she was more an angel than

ever when she yielded.
None but Parisian women are clever enough always to give a new charm

to the moon, to romanticize the stars, to roll in the same sack of
charcoal and emerge each time whiter than ever. This is the highest

refinement of intellectual and Parisian civilization. Women beyond the
Rhine or the English Channel believe nonsense of this sort when they

utter it; while your Parisienne makes her lover believe that she is an
angel, the better to add to his bliss by flattering his vanity on both

sides--temporal and spiritual. Certain persons, detractors of the
Duchess, maintain that she was the first dupe of her own white magic.

A wickedslander. The Duchess believed in nothing but herself.
By the end of the year 1823 the Kellers had supplied Victurnien with

two hundred thousand francs, and neither Chesnel nor Mlle. Armande
knew anything about it. He had had, besides, two thousand crowns from

Chesnel at one time and another, the better to hide the sources on
which he was drawing. He wrote lying letters to his poor father and

aunt, who lived on, happy and deceived, like most happy people under
the sun. The insidious current of life in Paris was bringing a

dreadful catastrophe upon the great and noble house; and only one
person was in the secret of it. This was du Croisier. He rubbed his

hands gleefully as he went past in the dark and looked in at the
Antiquities. He had good hope of attaining his ends; and his ends were

not, as heretofore, the simple ruin of the d'Esgrignons, but the
dishonor of their house. He felt instinctively at such times that his

revenge was at hand; he scented it in the wind! He had been sure of it
indeed from the day when he discovered that the young Count's burden

of debt was growing too heavy for the boy to bear.
Du Croisier's first step was to rid himself of his most hated enemy,

the venerable Chesnel. The good old man lived in the Rue du Bercail,
in a house with a steep-pitched roof. There was a little paved

courtyard in front, where the rose-bushes grew and clambered up to the
windows of the upper story. Behind lay a little country garden, with

its box-edged borders, shut in by damp, gloomy-looking walls. The
prim, gray-painted street door, with its wicket opening and bell

attached, announced quite as plainly as the official scutcheon that "a
notary lives here."

It was half-past five o'clock in the afternoon, at which hour the old
man usually sat digesting his dinner. He had drawn his black leather-

covered armchair before the fire, and put on his armor, a painted
pasteboard contrivance shaped like a top boot, which protected his

stockinged legs from the heat of the fire; for it was one of the good
man's habits to sit for a while after dinner with his feet on the dogs

and to stir up the glowing coals. He always ate too much; he was fond
of good living. Alas! if it had not been for that little failing,

would he not have been more perfect than it is permitted to mortal man
to be? Chesnel had finished his cup of coffee. His old housekeeper had

just taken away the tray which had been used for the purpose for the
last twenty years. He was waiting for his clerks to go before he

himself went out for his game at cards, and meanwhile he was thinking
--no need to ask of whom or what. A day seldom passed but he asked

himself, "Where is HE? What is HE doing?" He thought that the Count
was in Italy with the fair Duchesse de Maufrigneuse.

When every franc of a man's fortune has come to him, not by
inheritance, but through his own earning and saving, it is one of his

sweetest pleasures to look back upon the pains that have gone to the
making of it, and then to plan out a future for his crowns. This it is

to conjugate the verb "to enjoy" in every tense. And the old lawyer,
whose affections were all bound up in a single attachment, was

thinking that all the carefully-chosen, well-tilled land which he had
pinched and scraped to buy would one day go to round the d'Esgrignon

estates, and the thought doubled his pleasure. His pride swelled as he
sat at his ease in the old armchair; and the building of glowing

coals, which he raised with the tongs, sometimes seemed to him to be
the old noble house built up again, thanks to his care. He pictured

the young Count's prosperity, and told himself that he had done well
to live for such an aim. Chesnel was not lacking in intelligence;