“Oh,” said Contenson, “he said but one word —‘A sun of loveliness.’”
“We are being tricked by some rascals who beat us at the game,” said Peyrade. “Those villains mean to sell their woman very dear to the Baron.”
“Ja, mein Herr,” said Contenson.
“And so, when I heard you got slapped in the face at the Prefecture, I made Georges blab.”
“I should like very much to know who it is that has stolen a march on me,” said Peyrade. “We would measure our spurs!”
“We must play eavesdropper,” said Contenson.
“He is right,” said Peyrade. “We must get into chinks to listen, and wait ——”
“We will study that side of the subject,” cried Corentin. “For the present, I am out of work.
You, Peyrade, be a very good boy.
We must always obey Monsieur le Prefet!”
“Monsieur de Nucingen wants bleeding,” said Contenson; “he has too many banknotes in his veins.”
“But it was Lydie’s marriage-portion I looked for there!” said Peyrade, in a whisper to Corentin.
“Now, come along, Contenson, let us be off, and leave our daddy to by-bye, by-bye!”
“Monsieur,” said Contenson to Corentin on the doorstep, “what a queer piece of brokerage our good friend was planning!
Heh!
— What, marry a daughter with the price of —— Ah, ha!
It would make a pretty little play, and very moral too, entitled
‘A Girl’s Dower.’”
“You are highly organized animals, indeed,” replied Corentin.
“What ears you have! Certainly Social Nature arms all her species with the qualities needed for the duties she expects of them!
Society is second nature.”
“That is a highly philosophical view to take,” cried Contenson. “A professor would work it up into a system.”
“Let us find out all we can,” replied Corentin with a smile, as he made his way down the street with the spy, “as to what goes on at Monsieur de Nucingen’s with regard to this girl — the main facts; never mind the details ——”
“Just watch to see if his chimneys are smoking!” said Contenson.
“Such a man as the Baron de Nucingen cannot be happy incognito,” replied Corentin. “And besides, we for whom men are but cards, ought never to be tricked by them.”
“By gad! it would be the condemned jail-bird amusing himself by cutting the executioner’s throat.”
“You always have something droll to say,” replied Corentin, with a dim smile, that faintly wrinkled his set white face.
This business was exceedingly important in itself, apart from its consequences.
If it were not the Baron who had betrayed Peyrade, who could have had any interest in seeing the Prefet of Police?
From Corentin’s point of view it seemed suspicious. Were there any traitors among his men?
And as he went to bed, he wondered what Peyrade, too, was considering.
“Who can have gone to complain to the Prefet?
Whom does the woman belong to?”
And thus, without knowing each other, Jacques Collin, Peyrade, and Corentin were converging to a common point; while the unhappy Esther, Nucingen, and Lucien were inevitably entangled in the struggle which had already begun, and of which the point of pride, peculiar to police agents, was making a war to the death.
Thanks to Europe’s cleverness, the more pressing half of the sixty thousand francs of debt owed by Esther and Lucien was paid off.
The creditors did not even lose confidence.
Lucien and his evil genius could breathe for a moment.
Like some pool, they could start again along the edge of the precipice where the strong man was guiding the weak man to the gibbet or to fortune.
“We are staking now,” said Carlos to his puppet, “to win or lose all. But, happily, the cards are beveled, and the punters young.”
For some time Lucien, by his terrible Mentor’s orders, had been very attentive to Madame de Serizy.
It was, in fact, indispensable that Lucien should not be suspected of having kept a woman for his mistress.
And in the pleasure of being loved, and the excitement of fashionable life, he found a spurious power of forgetting.
He obeyed Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu by never seeing her excepting in the Bois or the Champs–Elysees.
On the day after Esther was shut up in the park-keeper’s house, the being who was to her so enigmatic and terrible, who weighed upon her soul, came to desire her to sign three pieces of stamped paper, made terrible by these fateful words: on the first, accepted payable for sixty thousand francs; on the second, accepted payable for a hundred and twenty thousand francs; on the third, accepted payable for a hundred and twenty thousand francs — three hundred thousand francs in all.
By writing Bon pour, you simply promise to pay.
The word accepted constitutes a bill of exchange, and makes you liable to imprisonment.
The word entails, on the person who is so imprudent as to sign, the risk of five years’ imprisonment — a punishment which the police magistrate hardly ever inflicts, and which is reserved at the assizes for confirmed rogues.
The law of imprisonment for debt is a relic of the days of barbarism, which combines with its stupidity the rare merit of being useless, inasmuch as it never catches swindlers.
“The point,” said the Spaniard to Esther, “is to get Lucien out of his difficulties.
We have debts to the tune of sixty thousand francs, and with these three hundred thousand francs we may perhaps pull through.”