hole
property into money, pay his debts, and place the remainder of his
capital in the banking-house with which his father had done business.

This house was the firm of Mongenod and Company, established in 1816
or 1817, whose reputation for honesty and uprightness had never been
questioned in the midst of the commercial depravity which smirched,
more or less, all the banking-houses of Paris. In spite of their immense
wealth, the houses of Nucingen, du Tillet, the Keller Brothers, Palma
and Company, were each regarded, more or less, with secret disrespect,
although it is true this disrespect was only whispered. Evil means
had produced such fine results, such political successes, dynastic
principles covered so completely base workings, that no one in 1834
thought of the mud in which the roots of these fine trees, the mainstay
of the State, were plunged. Nevertheless there was not a single one of
those great bankers to whom the confidence expressed in the house of
Mongenod was not a wound. Like English houses, the Mongenods made no
external display of luxury. They lived in dignified stillness, satisfied
to do their business prudently, wisely, and with a stern uprightness
which enabled them to carry it from one end of the globe to the other.

The actual head of the house, Frederic Mongenod, is the brother-in-law
of the Vicomte de Fontaine; therefore, this numerous family is
allied through the Baron de Fontaine to Monsieur Grossetete, the
receiver-general, brother of the Grossetete and Company of Limoges,
to the Vandenesses, and to Planat de Baudry, another receiver-general.
These connections, having procured for the late Mongenod, father of the
present head of the house, many favors in the financial operations
under the Restoration, obtained for him also the confidence of the old
_noblesse_, whose property and whose savings, which were immense, were
deposited in this bank. Far from coveting a peerage, like the Kellers,
Nucingen, and du Tillet, the Mongenods kept away from politics, and only
knew as much about them as their banking interests demanded.

The house of Mongenod is established in a fine old mansion in the rue de
la Victoire, where Madame Mongenod, the mother, lived with her two sons,
all three being partners in the house,--the share of the Vicomtesse
de Fontaine having been bought out by them on the death of the elder
Mongenod in 1827.

Frederic Mongenod, a handsome young man about thirty-five years of
age,