Rue Joubert.
"At that time the rascal possessed something like eighteen hundred

thousand francs; money must have weighted very little with him in the
question of marriage; and he had not merely been proof against

Malvina, he had resisted the Barons de Nucingen and de Rastignac;
though both of them had set him galloping at the rate of seventy-five

leagues a day, with outriders, regardless of expense, through mazes of
their cunning devices--and with never a clue of thread.

"Godefroid could not refrain from saying a word to his future sister-
in-law as to her ridiculous position between a banker and an attorney.

" 'You mean to read me a lecture on the subject of Ferdinand,' she
said frankly, 'to know the secret between us. Dear Godefroid, never

mention this again. Ferdinand's birth, antecedents, and fortune count
for nothing in this, so you may think it is something extraordinary.'

A few days afterwards, however, Malvina took Godefroid apart to say,
'I do not think that Desroches is sincere' (such is the instinct of

love); 'he would like to marry me, and he is paying court to some
tradesman's daughter as well. I should very much like to know whether

I am a second shift, and whether marriage is a matter of money with
him.' The fact was that Desroches, deep as he was, could not make out

du Tillet, and was afraid that he might marry Malvina. So the fellow
had secured his retreat. His position was intolerable, he was scarcely

paying his expenses and interest on the debt. Women understand nothing
of these things; for them, love is always a millionaire."

"But since neither du Tillet nor Desroches married her; just explain
Ferdinand's motive," said Finot.

"Motive?" repeated Bixiou; "why, this. General Rule: A girl that has
once given away her slipper, even if she refused it for ten years, is

never married by the man who----"
"Bosh!" interrupted Blondet, "one reason for loving is the fact that

one has loved. His motive? Here it is. General Rule: Do not marry as a
sergeant when some day you may be Duke of Dantzig and Marshal of

France. Now, see what a match du Tillet has made since then. He
married one of the Comte de Granville's daughters, into one of the

oldest families in the French magistracy."
"Desroches' mother had a friend, a druggist's wife," continued Bixiou.

"Said druggist had retired with a fat fortune. These druggist folk
have absurdly crude notions; by way of giving his daughter a good

education, he had sent her to a boarding-school! Well, Matifat meant
the girl to marry well, on the strength of two hundred thousand

francs, good hard coin with no scent of drugs about it."
"Florine's Matifat?" asked Blondet.

"Well, yes. Lousteau's Matifat; ours, in fact. The Matifats, even then
lost to us, had gone to live in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, as far as may

be from the Rue des Lombards, where their money was made. For my own
part, I had cultivated those Matifats. While I served my time in the

galleys of the law, when I was cooped up for eight hours out of the
twenty-four with nincompoops of the first water, I saw queer

characters enough to convince myself that all is not dead-level even
in obscure places, and that in the flattest inanity you may chance

upon an angle. Yes, dear boy, such and such a philistine is to such
another as Raphael is to Natoire.

"Mme. Desroches, the widowed mother, had long ago planned this
marriage for her son, in spite of a tremendousobstacle which took the

shape of one Cochin, Matifat's partner's son, a young clerk in the
adult department. M. and Mme. Matifat were of the opinion that an

attorney's position 'gave some guarantee for a wife's happiness,' to
use their own expression; and as for Desroches, he was prepared to

fall in with his mother's views in case he could do no better for
himself. Wherefore, he kept up his acquaintance with the druggists in

the Rue du Cherche-Midi.
"To put another kind of happiness before you, you should have a

description of these shopkeepers, male and female. They rejoiced in
the possession of a handsome ground floor and a strip of garden; for

amusement, they watched a little squirt of water, no bigger than a
cornstalk, perpetually rising and falling upon a small round freestone

slab in the middle of a basin some six feet across; they would rise
early of a morning to see if the plants in the garden had grown in the

night; they had nothing to do, they were restless, they dressed for
the sake of dressing, bored themselves at the theatre, and were for

ever going to and fro between Paris and Luzarches, where they had a
country house. I have dined there.

"Once they tried to quiz me, Blondet. I told them a long-winded story
that lasted from nine o'clock till midnight, one tale inside another.

I had just brought my twenty-ninth personage upon the scene (the
newspapers have plagiarized with their 'continued in our next'), when

old Matifat, who as host still held out, snored like the rest, after
blinking for five minutes. Next day they all complimented me upon the

ending of my tale!
"These tradespeople's society consisted of M. and Mme. Cochin, Mme.

Desroches, and a young Popinot, still in the drug business, who used
to bring them news of the Rue des Lombards. (You know him, Finot.)

Mme. Matifat loved the arts; she bought lithographs, chromo-
lithographs, and colored prints,--all the cheapest things she could

lay her hands on. The Sieur Matifat amused himself by looking into new
business speculations, investing a little capital now and again for

the sake of the excitement. Florine had cured him of his taste for the
Regency style of thing. One saying of his will give you some idea of

the depths in my Matifat. 'Art THOU going to bed, my nieces?' he used
to say when he wished them good-night, because (as he explained) he

was afraid of hurting their feelings with the more formal 'you.'
"The daughter was a girl with no manner at all. She looked rather like

a superior sort of housemaid. She could get through a sonata, she
wrote a pretty English hand, knew French grammar and orthography--a

complete commercial education, in short. She was impatient enough to
be married and leave the paternal roof, finding it as dull at home as

a lieutenant finds the nightwatch at sea; at the same time, it should
be said that her watch lasted through the whole twenty-four hours.

Desroches or Cochin junior, a notary or a lifeguardsman, or a sham
English lord,--any husband would have suited her. As she so obviously

knew nothing of life, I took pity upon her, I determined to reveal the
great secret of it. But, pooh! the Matifats shut their doors on me.

The bourgeois and I shall never understand each other."
"She married General Gouraud," said Finot.

"In forty-eight hours, Godefroid de Beaudenord, late of the diplomatic
corps, saw through the Matifats and their nefarious designs," resumed

Bixiou. "Rastignac happened to be chatting with the frivolous Baroness
when Godefroid came in to give his report to Malvina. A word here and

there reached his ear; he guessed the matter on foot, more
particularly from Malvina's look of satisfaction that it was as she

had suspected. Then Rastignac actually stopped on till two o'clock in
the morning. And yet there are those that call him selfish! Beaudenord

took his departure when the Baroness went to bed.
"As soon as Rastignac was left alone with Malvina, he spoke in a

fatherly, good-humored fashion. 'Dear child, please to bear in mind
that a poor fellow, heavy with sleep, has been drinking tea to keep

himself awake till two o'clock in the morning, all for a chance of
saying a solemn word of advice to you--MARRY! Do not be too

particular; do not brood over your feelings; never mind the sordid
schemes of men that have one foot here and another in the Matifats'

house; do not stop to think at all: Marry!--When a girl marries, it
means that the man whom she marries undertakes to maintain her in a

more or less good position in life, and at any rate her comfort is
assured. I know the world. Girls, mammas, and grandmammas are all of

them hypocrites when they fly off into sentiment over a question of
marriage. Nobody really thinks of anything but a good position. If a