Vat shall I do!
Vat shall become of me!
— She is right, dat cruel Europe.
Esther, if she is rich, shall not be for me. Shall I go hank myself?
Vat is life midout de divine flame of joy dat I have known?
Mein Gott, mein Gott!”
The old man snatched off the false hair he had combed in with his gray hairs these three months past.
A piercing shriek from Europe made Nucingen quail to his very bowels.
The poor banker rose and walked upstairs on legs that were drunk with the bowl of disenchantment he had just swallowed to the dregs, for nothing is more intoxicating than the wine of disaster.
At the door of her room he could see Esther stiff on her bed, blue with poison — dead!
He went up to the bed and dropped on his knees.
“You are right! She tolt me so!
— She is dead — of me ——”
Paccard, Asie, every one hurried in.
It was a spectacle, a shock, but not despair.
Every one had their doubts.
The Baron was a banker again. A suspicion crossed his mind, and he was so imprudent as to ask what had become of the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs, the price of the bond.
Paccard, Asie, and Europe looked at each other so strangely that Monsieur de Nucingen left the house at once, believing that robbery and murder had been committed.
Europe, detecting a packet of soft consistency, betraying the contents to be banknotes, under her mistress’ pillow, proceeded at once to “lay her out,” as she said.
“Go and tell monsieur, Asie!
— Oh, to die before she knew that she had seven millions!
Gobseck was poor madame’s uncle!” said she.
Europe’s stratagem was understood by Paccard.
As soon as Asie’s back was turned, Europe opened the packet, on which the hapless courtesan had written:
“To be delivered to Monsieur Lucien de Rubempre.”
Seven hundred and fifty thousand-franc notes shone in the eyes of Prudence Servien, who exclaimed:
“Won’t we be happy and honest for the rest of our lives!”
Paccard made no objection. His instincts as a thief were stronger than his attachment to Trompe-la-Mort.
“Durut is dead,” he said at length; “my shoulder is still a proof before letters. Let us be off together; divide the money, so as not to have all our eggs in one basket, and then get married.”
“But where can we hide?” said Prudence.
“In Paris,” replied Paccard.
Prudence and Paccard went off at once, with the promptitude of two honest folks transformed into robbers.
“My child,” said Carlos to Asie, as soon as she had said three words, “find some letter of Esther’s while I write a formal will, and then take the copy and the letter to Girard; but he must be quick. The will must be under Esther’s pillow before the lawyers affix the seals here.”
And he wrote out the following will:—
“Never having loved any one on earth but Monsieur Lucien Chardon de Rubempre, and being resolved to end my life rather than relapse into vice and the life of infamy from which he rescued me, I give and bequeath to the said Lucien Chardon de Rubempre all I may possess at the time of my decease, on condition of his founding a mass in perpetuity in the parish church of Saint–Roch for the repose of her who gave him her all, to her last thought.
“ESTHER GOBSECK.”
“That is quite in her style,” thought Trompe-la-Mort.
By seven in the evening this document, written and sealed, was placed by Asie under Esther’s bolster.
“Jacques,” said she, flying upstairs again, “just as I came out of the room justice marched in ——”
“The justice of the peace you mean?”
“No, my son.
The justice of the peace was there, but he had gendarmes with him. The public prosecutor and the examining judge are there too, and the doors are guarded.”
“This death has made a stir very quickly,” remarked Jacques Collin.
“Ay, and Paccard and Europe have vanished; I am afraid they may have scared away the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs,” said Asie.
“The low villains!” said Collin. “They have done for us by their swindling game.”
Human justice, and Paris justice, that is to say, the most suspicious, keenest, cleverest, and omniscient type of justice — too clever, indeed, for it insists on interpreting the law at every turn — was at last on the point of laying its hand on the agents of this horrible intrigue.
The Baron of Nucingen, on recognizing the evidence of poison, and failing to find his seven hundred and fifty thousand francs, imagined that one of two persons whom he greatly disliked — either Paccard or Europe — was guilty of the crime.
In his first impulse of rage he flew to the prefecture of police.
This was a stroke of a bell that called up all Corentin’s men.
The officials of the prefecture, the legal profession, the chief of the police, the justice of the peace, the examining judge — all were astir.