o the
owners of houses what farmers are to country landlords. All Paris has
seen one of its great tailors, building at his own cost, on the famous
site of Frascati, one of the most sumptuous of houses, and paying, as
principal tenant, fifty thousand francs a year for the ground rent of
the house, which, at the end of nineteen years' lease, was to become
the property of the owner of the land. In spite of the costs of
construction, which were something like seven hundred thousand francs,
the profits of those nineteen years proved, in the end, very large.

Cerizet, always on the watch for business, had examined the chances
for gain offered by the situation of the house which Thuillier had
_stolen_,--as he said to Desroches,--and he had seen the possibility of
letting it for sixty thousand at the end of six years. There were four
shops, two on each side, for it stood on a boulevard corner. Cerizet
expected, therefore, to get clear ten thousand a year for a dozen years,
allowing for eventualities and sundries attendant on renewal of leases.
He therefore proposed to himself to sell his money-lending business
to the widow Poiret and Cadenet for ten thousand francs; he already
possessed thirty thousand; and the two together would enable him to pay
the last year's rent in advance, which house-owners in Paris usually
demand as a guarantee from a principal tenant on a long lease. Cerizet
had spent a happy night; he fell asleep in a glorious dream; he
saw himself in a fair way to do an honest business, and to become a
bourgeois like Thuillier, like Minard, and so many others.

But he had a waking of which he did not dream. He found Fortune standing
before him, and emptying her gilded horns of plenty at his feet in the
person of Madame Cardinal. He had always had a liking for the woman, and
had promised her for a year past the necessary sum to buy a donkey and
a little cart, so that she could carry on her business on a large scale,
and go from Paris to the suburbs. Madame Cardinal, widow of a porter in
the corn-market, had an only daughter, whose beauty Cerizet had heard
of from some of the mother's cronies. Olympe Cardinal was about thirteen
years of age at the time, 1837, when Cerizet began his system of loans
in the quarter; and with a view to an infamous libertinism, he had paid
great attention to the mother, whom he rescued from utter misery, hoping
to make Olympe his mistress. But suddenly, in 1838, the girl left her
mother,