Etienne knew not of what ink he could churn
gold. Gambling-houses, so ruthlessly suppressed, could no longer, as of
old, cash I O U's drawn over the green table by beggary in despair. In
short, the journalist was reduced to such extremity that he had just
borrowed a hundred francs of the poorest of his friends, Bixiou, from
whom he had never yet asked for a franc. What distressed Lousteau was
not the fact of owing five thousand francs, but seeing himself bereft
of his elegance, and of the furniture purchased at the cost of so many
privations, and added to by Madame de la Baudraye.

On April the 3rd, a yellow poster, torn down by the porter after
being displayed on the wall, announced the sale of a handsome suite of
furniture on the following Saturday, the day fixed for sales under
legal authority. Lousteau was taking a walk, smoking cigars, and seeking
ideas--for, in Paris, ideas are in the air, they smile on you from a
street corner, they splash up with a spurt of mud from under the wheels
of a cab! Thus loafing, he had been seeking ideas for articles, and
subjects for novels for a month past, and had found nothing but friends
who carried him off to dinner or to the play, and who intoxicated his
woes, telling him that champagne would inspire him.

"Beware," said the virulent Bixiou one night, the man who would at the
same moment give a comrade a hundred francs and stab him to the heart
with a sarcasm; "if you go to sleep drunk every night, one day you will
wake up mad."

On the day before, the Friday, the unhappy wretch, although he was
accustomed to poverty, felt like a man condemned to death. Of old he
would have said:

"Well, the furniture is very old! I will buy new."

But he was incapable now of literary legerdemain. Publishers, undermined
by piracy, paid badly; the newspapers made close bargains with
hard-driven writers, as the Opera managers did with tenors that sang
flat.

He walked on, his eye on the crowd, though seeing nothing, a cigar
in his mouth, and his hands in his pockets, every feature of his face
twitching, and an affected smile on his lips. Then he saw Madame de la
Baudraye go by in a carriage; she was going to the Boulevard by the Rue
de la Chaussee d'Antin to drive in the Bois.

"There is nothing else left!" said he to himself, and he went home to
smarten himself up.

That evening, at seven, he arrived in a hackney cab at Madame de
la Baudraye's door, and begged the porter to send a not