This world has aspects that are very vilely dishonorable.'
" 'Yes,' said Rastignac, 'that is all very poetical, but this is a

matter of business. What a child you are! Now, listen to me. As to
your work, the public will decide upon it; and as for my literary

middle-man, hasn't he devoted eight years of his life to obtaining a
footing in the book-trade, and paid heavily for his experience? You

divide the money and the labor of the book with him very unequally,
but isn't yours the better part? Twenty-five louis means as much to

you as a thousand francs does to him. Come, you can write historical
memoirs, a work of art such as never was, since Diderot once wrote six

sermons for a hundred crowns!'
" 'After all,' I said, in agitation, 'I cannot choose but do it. So,

my dear friend, my thanks are due to you. I shall be quite rich with
twenty-five louis.'

" 'Richer than you think,' he laughed. 'If I have my commission from
Finot in this matter, it goes to you, can't you see? Now let us go to

the Bois de Boulogne,' he said; 'we shall see your countess there, and
I will show you the pretty little widow that I am to marry--a charming

woman, an Alsacienne, rather plump. She reads Kant, Schiller, Jean
Paul, and a host of lachrymose books. She has a mania for continually

asking my opinion, and I have to look as if I entered into all this
German sensibility, and to know a pack of ballads--drugs, all of them,

that my doctor absolutely prohibits. As yet I have not been able to
wean her from her literary enthusiasms; she sheds torrents of tears as

she reads Goethe, and I have to weep a little myself to please her,
for she has an income of fifty thousand livres, my dear boy, and the

prettiest little hand and foot in the world. Oh, if she would only say
mon ange and brouiller instead of mon anche and prouiller, she would

be perfection!'
"We saw the countess, radiant amid the splendors of her equipage. The

coquette bowed very graciously to us both, and the smile she gave me
seemed to me to be divine and full of love. I was very happy; I

fancied myself beloved; I had money, a wealth of love in my heart, and
my troubles were over. I was light-hearted, blithe, and content. I

found my friend's lady-love charming. Earth and air and heaven--all
nature--seemed to reflect Foedora's smile for me.

"As we returned through the Champs-Elysees, we paid a visit to
Rastignac's hatter and tailor. Thanks to the 'Necklace,' my

insignificant peace-footing was to end, and I made formidable
preparations for a campaign. Henceforward I need not shrink from a

contest with the spruce and fashionable young men who made Foedora's
circle. I went home, locked myself in, and stood by my dormer window,

outwardly calm enough, but in reality I bade a last good-bye to the
roofs without. I began to live in the future, rehearsed my life drama,

and discounted love and its happiness. Ah, how stormy life can grow to
be within the four walls of a garret! The soul within us is like a

fairy; she turns straw into diamonds for us; and for us, at a touch of
her wand, enchanted palaces arise, as flowers in the meadows spring up

towards the sun.
"Towards noon, next day, Pauline knocked gently at my door, and

brought me--who could guess it?--a note from Foedora. The countess
asked me to take her to the Luxembourg, and to go thence to see with

her the Museum and Jardin des Plantes.
" 'The man is waiting for an answer,' said Pauline, after quietly

waiting for a moment.
"I hastily scrawled my acknowledgements, and Pauline took the note. I

changed my dress. When my toilette was ended, and I looked at myself
with some complaisance, an icy shiver ran through me as I thought:

" 'Will Foedora walk or drive? Will it rain or shine?--No matter,
though,' I said to myself; 'whichever it is, can one ever reckon with

feminine caprice? She will have no money about her, and will want to
give a dozen francs to some little Savoyard because his rags are

picturesque.'
"I had not a brass farthing, and should have no money till the evening

came. How dearly a poet pays for the intellectualprowess that method
and toil have brought him, at such crises of our youth! Innumerable

painfully vivid thoughts pierced me like barbs. I looked out of my
window; the weather was very unsettled. If things fell out badly, I

might easily hire a cab for the day; but would not the fear lie on me
every moment that I might not meet Finot in the evening? I felt too

weak to endure such fears in the midst of my felicity. Though I felt
sure that I should find nothing, I began a grand search through my

room; I looked for imaginary coins in the recesses of my mattress; I
hunted about everywhere--I even shook out my old boots. A nervous

fever seized me; I looked with wild eyes at the furniture when I had
ransacked it all. Will you understand, I wonder, the excitement that

possessed me when, plunged deep in the listlessness of despair, I
opened my writing-table drawer, and found a fair and splendid ten-

franc piece that shone like a rising star, new and sparkling, and
slily hiding in a cranny between two boards? I did not try to account

for its previous reserve and the cruelty of which it had been guilty
in thus lying hidden; I kissed it for a friend faithful in adversity,

and hailed it with a cry that found an echo, and made me turn sharply,
to find Pauline with a face grown white.

" 'I thought,' she faltered, 'that you had hurt yourself! The man who
brought the letter----' (she broke off as if something smothered her

voice). 'But mother has paid him,' she added, and flitted away like a
wayward, capricious child. Poor little one! I wanted her to share in

my happiness. I seemed to have all the happiness in the world within
me just then; and I would fain have returned to the unhappy, all that

I felt as if I had stolen from them.
"The intuitive perception of adversity is sound for the most part; the

countess had sent away her carriage. One of those freaks that pretty
women can scarcely explain to themselves had determined her to go on

foot, by way of the boulevards, to the Jardin des Plantes.
" 'It will rain,' I told her, and it pleased her to contradict me.

"As it fell out, the weather was fine while we went through the
Luxembourg; when we came out, some drops fell from a great cloud,

whose progress I had watched uneasily, and we took a cab. At the
Museum I was about to dismiss the vehicle, and Foedora (what agonies!)

asked me not to do so. But it was like a dream in broad daylight for
me, to chat with her, to wander in the Jardin des Plantes, to stray

down the shady alleys, to feel her hand upon my arm; the secret
transports repressed in me were reduced, no doubt, to a fixed and

foolish smile upon my lips; there was something unreal about it all.
Yet in all her movements, however alluring, whether we stood or

whether we walked, there was nothing either tender or lover-like. When
I tried to share in a measure the action of movement prompted by her

life, I became aware of a check, or of something strange in her that I
cannot explain, or an inner activity concealed in her nature. There is

no suavity about the movements of women who have no soul in them. Our
wills were opposed, and we did not keep step together. Words are

wanting to describe this outward dissonance between two beings; we are
not accustomed to read a thought in a movement. We instinctively feel

this phenomenon of our nature, but it cannot be expressed.
"I did not dissect my sensations during those violent seizures of

passion," Raphael went on, after a moment of silence, as if he were
replying to an objection raised by himself. "I did not analyze my

pleasures nor count my heartbeats then, as a miser scrutinizes and
weighs his gold pieces. No; experience sheds its melancholy light over

the events of the past to-day, and memory brings these pictures back,
as the sea-waves in fair weather cast up fragment after fragment of

the debris of a wrecked vessel upon the strand.
" 'It is in your power to render me a rather important service,' said

the countess, looking at me in an embarrassed way. 'After confiding in
you my aversion to lovers, I feel myself more at liberty to entreat

your good offices in the name of friendship. Will there not be very
much more merit in obliging me to-day?' she asked, laughing.

"I looked at her in anguish. Her manner was coaxing, but in no wise
affectionate; she felt nothing for me; she seemed to be playing a

part, and I thought her a consummateactress. Then all at once my
hopes awoke once more, at a single look and word. Yet if reviving love

expressed itself in my eyes, she bore its light without any change in
the clearness of her own; they seemed, like a tiger's eyes, to have a

sheet of metal behind them. I used to hate her in such moments.
" 'The influence of the Duc de Navarreins would be very useful to me,