will give me your advice without charging fees as long as I live, will

you not?'
" 'So be it; so long as there is no outlay.'

" 'Precisely,' said he. "Ah, by the by, you will allow me to go to see
you?' (Plainly the old man found it not so easy to assume the air of

good-humor.)
" 'I shall always be glad.'

" 'Ah! yes, but it would be very difficult to arrange of a morning.
You will have your affairs to attend to, and I have mine.'

" 'Then come in the evening.'
" 'Oh, no!' he answered briskly, 'you ought to go into society and see

your clients, and I myself have my friends at my cafe.'
" 'His friends!' thought I to myself.--'Very well,' said I, 'why not

come at dinner-time?'
" 'That is the time,' said Gobseck, 'after 'Change, at five o'clock.

Good, you will see me Wednesdays and Saturdays. We will talk over
business like a pair of friends. Aha! I am gay sometimes. Just give me

the wing of a partridge and a glass of champagne, and we will have our
chat together. I know a great many things that can be told now at this

distance of time; I will teach you to know men, and what is more--
women!'

" 'Oh! a partridge and a glass of champagne if you like.'
" 'Don't do anything foolish, or I shall lose my faith in you. And

don't set up housekeeping in a grand way. Just one old general
servant. I will come and see that you keep your health. I have capital

invested in your head, he! he! so I am bound to look after you. There,
come round in the evening and bring your principal with you!'

" 'Would you mind telling me, if there is no harm in asking, what was
the good of my birth certificate in this business?' I asked, when the

little old man and I stood on the doorstep.
"Jean-Esther Van Gobseck shrugged his shoulders, smiled maliciously,

and said, 'What blockheads youngsters are! Learn, master attorney (for
learn you must if you don't mean to be taken in), that integrity and

brains in a man under thirty are commodities which can be mortgaged.
After that age there is no counting on a man.'

"And with that he shut the door.
"Three months later I was an attorney. Before very long, madame, it

was my good fortune to undertake the suit for the recovery of your
estates. I won the day, and my name became known. In spite of the

exorbitant rate of interest, I paid off Gobseck in less than five
years. I married Fanny Malvaut, whom I loved with all my heart. There

was a parallel between her life and mine, between our hard work and
our luck, which increased the strength of feeling on either side. One

of her uncles, a well-to-do farmer, died and left her seventy thousand
francs, which helped to clear off the loan. From that day my life has

been nothing but happiness and prosperity. Nothing is more utterly
uninteresting than a happy man, so let us say no more on that head,

and return to the rest of the characters.
"About a year after the purchase of the practice, I was dragged into a

bachelor breakfast-party given by one of our number who had lost a bet
to a young man greatly in vogue in the fashionable world. M. de

Trailles, the flower of the dandyism of that day, enjoyed a prodigious
reputation."

"But he is still enjoying it," put in the Comte de Born. "No one wears
his clothes with a finer air, nor drives a tandem with a better grace.

It is Maxime's gift; he can gamble, eat, and drink more gracefully
than any man in the world. He is a judge of horses, hats, and

pictures. All the women lose their heads over him. He always spends
something like a hundred thousand francs a year, and no creature can

discover that he has an acre of land or a single dividendwarrant. The
typical knight errant of our salons, our boudoirs, our boulevards, an

amphibian half-way between a man and a woman--Maxime de Trailles is a
singular being, fit for anything, and good for nothing, quite as

capable of perpetrating a benefit as of planning a crime; sometimes
base, sometimes noble, more often bespattered with mire than

besprinkled with blood, knowing more of anxiety than of remorse, more
concerned with his digestion than with any mental process, shamming

passion, feeling nothing. Maxime de Trailles is a brilliant link
between the hulks and the best society; he belongs to the eminently

intelligent class from which a Mirabeau, or a Pitt, or a Richelieu
springs at times, though it is more wont to produce Counts of Horn,

Fouquier-Tinvilles, and Coignards."
"Well," pursued Derville, when he had heard the Vicomtesse's brother

to the end, "I had heard a good deal about this individual from poor
old Goriot, a client of mine; and I had already been at some pains to

avoid the dangerous honor of his acquaintance, for I came across him
sometimes in society. Still, my chum was so pressing about this

breakfast-party of his that I could not well get out of it, unless I
wished to earn a name for squeamishness. Madame, you could hardly

imagine what a bachelor's breakfast-party is like. It means superb
display and a studiedrefinement seldom seen; the luxury of a miser

when vanity leads him to be sumptuous for a day.
"You are surprised as you enter the room at the neatness of the table,

dazzling by reason of its silver and crystal and linen damask. Life is
here in full bloom; the young fellows are graceful to behold; they

smile and talk in low, demure voices like so many brides; everything
about them looks girlish. Two hours later you might take the room for

a battlefield after the fight. Broken glasses, serviettes crumpled and
torn to rags lie strewn about among the nauseous-looking remnants of

food on the dishes. There is an uproar that stuns you, jesting toasts,
a fire of witticisms and bad jokes; faces are empurpled, eyes inflamed

and expressionless, unintentional confidences tell you the whole
truth. Bottles are smashed, and songs trolled out in the height of a

diabolical racket; men call each other out, hang on each other's
necks, or fall to fisticuffs; the room is full of a horrid, close

scent made up of a hundred odors, and noise enough for a hundred
voices. No one has any notion of what he is eating or drinking or

saying. Some are depressed, others babble, one will turn monomaniac,
repeating the same word over and over again like a bell set jangling;

another tries to keep the tumult within bounds; the steadiest will
propose an orgy. If any one in possession of his faculties should come

in, he would think that he had interrupted a Bacchanalian rite.
"It was in the thick of such a chaos that M. de Trailles tried to

insinuate himself into my good graces. My head was fairly clear, I was
upon my guard. As for him, though he pretended to be decently drunk,

he was perfectly cool, and knew very well what he was about. How it
was done I do not know, but the upshot of it was that when we left

Grignon's rooms about nine o'clock in the evening, M. de Trailles had
thoroughly bewitched me. I had given him my promise that I would

introduce him the next day to our Papa Gobseck. The words 'honor,'
'virtue,' 'countess,' 'honest woman,' and 'ill-luck' were mingled in

his discourse with magical potency, thanks to that golden tongue of
his.

"When I awoke next morning, and tried to recollect what I had done the
day before, it was with great difficulty that I could make a connected

tale from my impressions. At last, it seemed to me that the daughter
of one of my clients was in danger of losing her reputation, together

with her husband's love and esteem, if she could not get fifty
thousand francs together in the course of the morning. There had been

gaming debts, and carriage-builders' accounts, money lost to Heaven
knows whom. My magician of a boon companion had impressed it upon me

that she was rich enough to make good these reverses by a few years of
economy. But only now did I begin to guess the reasons of his urgency.

I confess, to my shame, that I had not the shadow of a doubt but that
it was a matter of importance that Daddy Gobseck should make it up

with this dandy. I was dressing when the young gentleman appeared.
" 'M. le Comte,' said I, after the usual greetings, 'I fail to see why

you should need me to effect an introduction to Van Gobseck, the most