he may belie without
harmful results. Fancy Mahomet in Paris in the nineteenth century! His
wife would be a Rohan, a Duchesse de Chevreuse of the Fronde, as keen
and as flattering as an Ambassadress, as wily as Figaro. Your loving
wives lead nowhere; a woman of the world leads to everything; she is the
diamond with which a man cuts every window when he has not the golden
key which unlocks every door. Leave humdrum virtues to the humdrum,
ambitious vices to the ambitious.

"Besides, my dear fellow, do you imagine that the love of a Duchesse
de Langeais, or de Maufrigneuse, or of a Lady Dudley does not bestow
immense pleasure? If only you knew how much value the cold, severe style
of such a woman gives to the smallest evidence of their affection! What
a delight it is to see a periwinkle piercing through the snow! A smile
from below a fan contradicts the reserve of an assumed attitude, and is
worth all the unbridled tenderness of your middle-class women with
their mortgaged devotion; for, in love, devotion is nearly akin to
speculation.

"And, then, a woman of fashion, a Blamont-Chauvry, has her virtues too!
Her virtues are fortune, power, effect, a certain contempt of all that
is beneath her----"

"Thank you!" said Bianchon.

"Old curmudgeon!" said Rastignac, laughing. "Come--do not be so common,
do like your friend Desplein; be a Baron, a Knight of Saint-Michael;
become a peer of France, and marry your daughters to dukes."

"I! May the five hundred thousand devils----"

"Come, come! Can you be superior only in medicine? Really, you distress
me..."

"I hate that sort of people; I long for a revolution to deliver us from
them for ever."

"And so, my dear Robespierre of the lancet, you will not go to-morrow to
your uncle Popinot?"

"Yes, I will," said Bianchon; "for you I would go to hell to fetch
water..."

"My good friend, you really touch me. I have sworn that a commission
shall sit on the Marquis. Why, here is even a long-saved tear to thank
you."

"But," Bianchon went on, "I do not promise to succeed as you wish with
Jean-Jules Popinot. You do not know him. However, I will take him to see
your Marquise the day after to-morrow; she may get round him if she can.
I doubt it. If all the truffles, all the Duchesses, all the mistresses,
and all the charmers in Paris were there in the full bloom of their
beauty; if the King promised him the _Prairie_, and the Almighty gave
him the Order of Paradise with the re