a manufactory of
varnished leather which he started at Gentilly; it pays him a large
profit. His aunt, Jacqueline Collin, who lives with him, still does a
shady business secretly, which of course brings in large fees, and I
have the best of reasons for believing that they both gamble at the
Bourse. He is so anxious to keep out of the mud that he has gone to the
other extreme. Every evening he plays dominoes, like any bourgeois, in
a cafe near the Prefecture, and Sundays he goes out to a little box of a
place he has bought near the forest of Romainville, in the Saint-Gervais
meadows; there he cultivates blue dahlias, and talked, last year, of
crowning a Rosiere. All that, my dear colonel, is too bucolic to allow
of my employing him on any political police-work."

"I think myself," said Franchessini, "that in order not to attract
attention, he rolls himself too much into a ball."

"Make him unwind, and then, if he wants to return to active life and
take a hand in politics, he may find some honest way of doing so. He'll
never make a Saint Vincent de Paul,--though the saint was at the galleys
once upon a time; but there are plenty of ways in which he could get a
third or fourth class reputation. If Monsieur de Saint-Esteve, as he now
calls himself, takes that course, and I am still in power, tell him to
come and see me; I might employ him then."

"That is something, certainly," said Franchessini, aloud; but he thought
to himself that since the days of the pension Vauquer the minister
had taken long strides and that roles had changed between himself and
Vautrin.

"You can tell him what I say," continued Rastignac, going up the steps
of the portico, "but be cautious how you word it."

"Don't be uneasy," replied the colonel. "I will speak to him
judiciously, for he's a man who must not be pushed too far; there are
some old scores in life one can't wipe out."

The minister, by making no reply to this remark, seemed to admit the
truth of it.

"You must be in the Chamber when the king opens it; we shall want all
the enthusiasm we can muster," said Rastignac to the colonel, as they
parted.

The latter, when he took leave of Madame de Rastignac, asked on what day
he might have the honor of presenting his wife.

"Why, any day," replied the countess, "but particularly on Fridays."

IV. A CATECHISM

Rastignac called on Madame de l'Estorade the next day at the hour named
to him by his wife. Like all those present at