seen her, calls her a penitential scrubber. Cardot is a man of
forty; he will be mayor of his district, and perhaps be elected deputy.
He is prepared to give in lieu of the hundred thousand francs a nice
little house in the Rue Saint-Lazare, with a forecourt and a garden,
which cost him no more than sixty thousand at the time of the July
overthrow; he would sell, and that would be an opportunity for you to
go and come at the house, to see the daughter, and be civil to the
mother.--And it would give you a look of property in Madame Cardot's
eyes. You would be housed like a prince in that little mansion. Then,
by Camusot's interest, you may get an appointment as librarian to some
public office where there is no library.--Well, and then if you invest
your money in backing up a newspaper, you will get ten thousand francs
a year on it, you can earn six, your librarianship will bring you in
four.--Can you do better for yourself?

"If you were to marry a lamb without spot, it might be a light woman by
the end of two years. What is the damage?--an anticipated dividend! It
is quite the fashion.

"Take my word for it, you can do no better than come to dine with Malaga
to-morrow. You will meet your father-in-law; he will know the secret has
been let out--by Malaga, with whom he cannot be angry--and then you are
master of the situation. As to your wife!--Why her misconduct leaves you
as free as a bachelor----"

"Your language is as blunt as a cannon ball."

"I love you for your own sake, that is all--and I can reason. Well! why
do you stand there like a wax image of Abd-el-Kader? There is nothing 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 n