I shall lose my faith in you. And don't
set up housekeeping in a grand way. Just one old general servant. I will
come and see that you keep your health. I have capital invested in your
head, he! he! so I am bound to look after you. There, come round in the
evening and bring your principal with you!'

"'Would you mind telling me, if there is no harm in asking, what was the
good of my birth certificate in this business?' I asked, when the little
old man and I stood on the doorstep.

"Jean-Esther Van Gobseck shrugged his shoulders, smiled maliciously, and
said, 'What blockheads youngsters are! Learn, master attorney (for learn
you must if you don't mean to be taken in), that integrity and brains
in a man under thirty are commodities which can be mortgaged. After that
age there is no counting on a man.'

"And with that he shut the door.

"Three months later I was an attorney. Before very long, madame, it was
my good fortune to undertake the suit for the recovery of your estates.
I won the day, and my name became known. In spite of the exorbitant rate
of interest, I paid off Gobseck in less than five years. I married Fanny
Malvaut, whom I loved with all my heart. There was a parallel between
her life and mine, between our hard work and our luck, which increased
the strength of feeling on either side. One of her uncles, a well-to-do
farmer, died and left her seventy thousand francs, which helped to clear
off the loan. From that day my life has been nothing but happiness and
prosperity. Nothing is more utterly uninteresting than a happy man,
so let us say no more on that head, and return to the rest of the
characters.

"About a year after the purchase of the practice, I was dragged into a
bachelor breakfast-party given by one of our number who had lost a
bet to a young man greatly in vogue in the fashionable world. M. de
Trailles, the flower of the dandyism of that day, enjoyed a prodigious
reputation."

"But he is still enjoying it," put in the Comte de Born. "No one wears
his clothes with a finer air, nor drives a tandem with a better grace.
It is Maxime's gift; he can gamble, eat, and drink more gracefully than
any man in the world. He is a judge of horses, hats, and pictures. All
the women lose their heads over him. He always spends something like a
hundred thousand francs a year, and no creature can discover that he has
an acre of land or a single dividend warrant. The typical knight errant
of our salons, our bo