ne of those exquisite creatures
whom it has pleased heaven to endow with the rarest and most surpassing
beauty. As it is impossible that they should all be duchesses or queens
(since there are many more pretty women in the world than titles and
thrones for them to adorn), they are content to make a stockbroker or a
banker happy at a fixed price. To this good-natured beauty, Euphrasia
by name, an unbounded ambition had led a notary's clerk to aspire. In
short, the second clerk in the office of Maitre Crottat, notary, had
fallen in love with her, as youth at two-and-twenty can fall in love.
The scrivener would have murdered the Pope and run amuck through the
whole sacred college to procure the miserable sum of a hundred louis to
pay for a shawl which had turned Euphrasia's head, at which price her
waiting-woman had promised that Euphrasia should be his. The infatuated
youth walked to and fro under Madame Euphrasia's windows, like the
polar bears in their cage at the Jardin des Plantes, with his right hand
thrust beneath his waistcoat in the region of the heart, which he was
fit to tear from his bosom, but as yet he had only wrenched at the
elastic of his braces.

"What can one do to raise ten thousand francs?" he asked himself. "Shall
I make off with the money that I must pay on the registration of that
conveyance? Good heavens! my loan would not ruin the purchaser, a man
with seven millions! And then next day I would fling myself at his feet
and say, 'I have taken ten thousand francs belonging to you, sir; I am
twenty-two years of age, and I am in love with Euphrasia--that is my
story. My father is rich, he will pay you back; do not ruin me! Have
not you yourself been twenty-two years old and madly in love?' But these
beggarly landowners have no souls! He would be quite likely to give me
up to the public prosecutor, instead of taking pity upon me. Good God!
if it were only possible to sell your soul to the Devil! But there is
neither a God nor a Devil; it is all nonsense out of nursery tales and
old wives' talk. What shall I do?"

"If you have a mind to sell your soul to the Devil, sir," said the
house-painter, who had overheard something that the clerk let fall, "you
can have the ten thousand francs."

"And Euphrasia!" cried the clerk, as he struck a bargain with the devil
that inhabited the house-painter.

The pact concluded, the frantic clerk went to find the shawl, and
mounted Madame Euphrasia's staircase; and as