thing to
meditate over. Marriage is heads or tails--well, you have tossed heads
up."

"You shall have my reply to-morrow," said Lousteau.

"I would sooner have it at once; Malaga will write you up to-night."

"Well, then, yes."

Lousteau spent the evening in writing a long letter to the Marquise,
giving her the reasons which compelled him to marry; his constant
poverty, the torpor of his imagination, his white hairs, his moral and
physical exhaustion--in short, four pages of arguments.--"As to Dinah,
I will send her a circular announcing the marriage," said he to himself.
"As Bixiou says, I have not my match for knowing how to dock the tail of
a passion."

Lousteau, who at first had been on some ceremony with himself, by next
day had come to the point of dreading lest the marriage should not come
off. He was pressingly civil to the notary.

"I knew monsieur your father," said he, "at Florentine's, so I may well
know you here, at Mademoiselle Turquet's. Like father, like son. A very
good fellow and a philosopher, was little Daddy Cardot--excuse me,
we always called him so. At that time, Florine, Florentine, Tullia,
Coralie, and Mariette were the five fingers of your hand, so to
speak--it is fifteen years ago. My follies, as you may suppose, are a
thing of the past.--In those days it was pleasure that ran away with me;
now I am ambitious; but, in our day, to get on at all a man must be
free from debt, have a good income, a wife, and a family. If I pay taxes
enough to qualify me, I may be a deputy yet, like any other man."

Maitre Cardot appreciated this profession of faith. Lousteau had laid
himself out to please and the notary liked him, feeling himself more
at his ease, as may be easily imagined, with a man who had known his
father's secrets than he would have been with another. On the following
day Lousteau was introduced to the Cardot family as the purchaser of the
house in the Rue Saint-Lazare, and three days later he dined there.

Cardot lived in an old house near the Place du Chatelet. In this house
everything was "good." Economy covered every scrap of gilding with green
gauze; all the furniture wore holland covers. Though it was impossible
to feel a shade of uneasiness as to the wealth of the inhabitants, at
the end of half an hour no one could suppress a yawn. Boredom perched
in every nook; the curtains hung dolefully; the dining-room was like
Harpagon's. Even if Lousteau had not known all about Malaga,