st time, when she
was fully convinced that she was a lady and the mistress of the house,
Castanier uttered one by one the thoughts that filled her mind as she
drank her coffee.

"Do you know what you are thinking, child?" he said, smiling. "I will
tell you: 'So all that lovely rosewood furniture that I coveted so much,
and the pretty dresses that I used to try on, are mine now! All on easy
terms that Madame refused, I do no know why. My word! if I might
drive about in a carriage, have jewels and pretty things, a box at the
theatre, and put something by! with me he should lead a life of pleasure
fit to kill him if he were not as strong as a Turk! I never saw such
a man!'--Was not that just what you were thinking," he went on, and
something in his voice made Jenny turn pale. "Well, yes, child; you
could not stand it, and I am sending you away for your own good; you
would perish in the attempt. Come, let us part good friends," and he
coolly dismissed her with a very small sum of money.

The first use that Castanier had promised himself that he would make of
the terrible power brought at the price of his eternal happiness, was
the full and complete indulgence of all his tastes.

He first put his affairs in order, readily settled his accounts with
M. de Nucingen, who found a worthy German to succeed him, and then
determined on a carouse worthy of the palmiest days of the Roman Empire.
He plunged into dissipation as recklessly as Belshazzar of old went to
that last feast in Babylon. Like Belshazzar, he saw clearly through his
revels a gleaming hand that traced his doom in letters of flame, not on
the narrow walls of the banqueting-chamber, but over the vast spaces
of heaven that the rainbow spans. His feast was not, indeed, an orgy
confined within the limits of a banquet, for he squandered all the
powers of soul and body in exhausting all the pleasures of earth. The
table was in some sort earth itself, the earth that trembled beneath
his feet. His was the last festival of the reckless spendthrift who has
thrown all prudence to the winds. The devil had given him the key of the
storehouse of human pleasures; he had filled and refilled his hands, and
he was fast nearing the bottom. In a moment he had felt all that that
enormous power could accomplish; in a moment he had exercised it, proved
it, wearied of it. What had hitherto been the sum of human desires
became as nothing. So often it happens that with possession the vast
p