entered his cabinet. Almost immediately after, a messenger
handed him a card: _Molina, Banker_.

"How strange it is!" thought Sulpice. "I had him in mind."

In the course of his troublesome reflections concerning the Gochard
paper, Vaudrey persistently thought of that fat, powerful man who
laughed and harangued in a loud voice in the greenroom of the ballet, as
he patted with his fat fingers the delicate chin of Marie Launay.

Why! if he were willing, this Molina--Molina the Tumbler!--for him it is
a mere bagatelle, a hundred thousand francs!

Salomon Molina entered the minister's cabinet just as he made his way
into the foyer of the Opera, with swelling chest, tilted chin and
stomach thrust forward.

"Monsieur le Ministre," he said in a clear voice, as he spread himself
out in the armchair that Vaudrey pointed out to him, "I notify you that
you have my maiden visit!--I am still in a state of innocency! On my
honor, this is the first time I have set my foot within a minister's
office!"

He manifested his independence--born of his colossal influence--by his
satisfied and successful air. The former Marseillaise clothes-dealer, in
his youth pouncing upon the sailors of the port and Maltese and
Levantine seamen, to palm off on them a second-hand coat or trousers, as
the wardrobe dealers of the Temple hook the passer-by, Salomon Molina,
who had paraded his rags and his hopes on the Canebiere, dreaming at the
back of his dark shop of the triumphs, the pleasures, the revels and the
indigestions that money affords, had, moreover, always preserved the
bitterness of those wretched days and his red, Jewish lip expressed the
gall of his painful experiences.

His first word as he entered Vaudrey's cabinet, asserting the virginity
of his efforts at solicitation, betrayed his bitterness.

Now, triumphant, powerful, delighted, feasted and fat, his massive form,
his gross flesh and his money were in evidence all over Paris. His huge
paunch, shaking with laughter, filled the stage-boxes at the theatres.
He expanded his broad shoulders as he reclined in the caleche that
deposited him on race-days at the entrance of the weighing-enclosure. He
held by the neck, as it were, everything of the Parisian quarry that
yelps and bounds about money, issues of stock, and the food of public
fortune: bankers, stock-brokers, and jobbers, financial, political and
exchange editors, wretches running after a hundred sous, statesmen in a
fair way t