ch!"

The cause of this phenomenon was as follows: Lousteau lived in the Rue
des Martyrs in pretty ground-floor rooms with a garden, and splendidly
furnished. When he settled there in 1833 he had come to an agreement
with an upholsterer that kept his pocket money low for a long time.
These rooms were let for twelve hundred francs. The months of January,
April, July, and October were, as he phrased it, his indigent months.
The rent and the porter's account cleaned him out. Lousteau took no
fewer hackney cabs, spend a hundred francs in breakfasts all the same,
smoked thirty francs' worth of cigars, and could never refuse the
mistress of a day a dinner or a new dress. He thus dipped so deeply into
the fluctuating earnings of the following months, that he could no more
find a hundred francs on his chimney-piece now, when he was making seven
or eight hundred francs a month, than he could in 1822, when he was
hardly getting two hundred.

Tired, sometimes, by the incessant vicissitudes of a literary life, and
as much bored by amusement as a courtesan, Lousteau would get out of the
tideway and sit on the bank, and say to one and another of his intimate
allies--Nathan or Bixiou, as they sat smoking in his scrap of garden,
looking out on an evergreen lawn as big as a dinner-table:

"What will be the end of us? White hairs are giving us respectful
hints!"

"Lord! we shall marry when we choose to give as much thought to the
matter as we give to a drama or a novel," said Nathan.

"And Florine?" retorted Bixiou.

"Oh, we all have a Florine," said Etienne, flinging away the end of his
cigar and thinking of Madame Schontz.

Madame Schontz was a pretty enough woman to put a very high price on the
interest on her beauty, while reserving absolute ownership for Lousteau,
the man of her heart. Like all those women who get the name in Paris of
_Lorettes_, from the Church of Notre Dame de Lorette, round about
which they dwell, she lived in the Rue Flechier, a stone's throw from
Lousteau. This lady took a pride and delight in teasing her friends by
boasting of having a Wit for her lover.

These details of Lousteau's life and fortune are indispensable, for this
penury and this bohemian existence of a man to whom Parisian luxury
had become a necessity, were fated to have a cruel influence on Dinah's
life. Those to whom the bohemia of Paris is familiar will now understand
how it was that, by the end of a fortnight, the journalist, up to