Nobody
could give an answer to these questions. I myself never saw money in his
room. Doubtless his capital was safely stowed in the strong rooms of the
Bank. He used to collect his bills himself as they fell due, running
all over Paris on a pair of shanks as skinny as a stag's. On occasion he
would be a martyr to prudence. One day, when he happened to have gold in
his pockets, a double napoleon worked its way, somehow or other, out of
his fob and fell, and another lodger following him up the stairs picked
up the coin and returned it to its owner.

"'That isn't mine!' said he, with a start of surprise. 'Mine indeed! If
I were rich, should I live as I do!'

"He made his cup of coffee himself every morning on the cast-iron
chafing dish which stood all day in the black angle of the grate; his
dinner came in from a cookshop; and our old porter's wife went up at the
prescribed hour to set his room in order. Finally, a whimsical chance,
in which Sterne would have seen predestination, had named the man
Gobseck. When I did business for him later, I came to know that he was
about seventy-six years old at the time when we became acquainted. He
was born about 1740, in some outlying suburb of Antwerp, of a Dutch
father and a Jewish mother, and his name was Jean-Esther Van Gobseck.
You remember how all Paris took an interest in that murder case, a
woman named _La belle Hollandaise_? I happened to mention it to my old
neighbor, and he answered without the slightest symptom of interest or
surprise, 'She is my grandniece.'

"That was the only remark drawn from him by the death of his sole
surviving next of kin, his sister's granddaughter. From reports of the
case I found that _La belle Hollandaise_ was in fact named Sara Van
Gobseck. When I asked by what curious chance his grandniece came to bear
his surname, he smiled:

"'The women never marry in our family.'

"Singular creature, he had never cared to find out a single relative
among four generations counted on the female side. The thought of his
heirs was abhorrent to him; and the idea that his wealth could pass into
other hands after his death simply inconceivable.

"He was a child, ten years old, when his mother shipped him off as a
cabin boy on a voyage to the Dutch Straits Settlements, and there he
knocked about for twenty years. The inscrutable lines on that sallow
forehead kept the secret of horrible adventures, sudden panic,
unhoped-for luck, romantic cross events, joys