ot had
contrived to count up his expenditure on Hortense's wedding portion,
and at the same time to defray the frightful cost of the charming
rooms where Madame Marneffe was to make her home. His financial scheme
bore that stamp of talent which leads prodigals and men in love into
the quagmires where so many disasters await them. Nothing can
demonstrate more completely the strange capacity communicated by vice,
to which we owe the strokes of skill which ambitious or voluptuous men
can occasionally achieve--or, in short, any of the Devil's pupils.

On the day before, old Johann Fischer, unable to pay thirty thousand
francs drawn for on him by his nephew, had found himself under the
necessity of stopping payment unless the Baron could remit the sum.

This ancient worthy, with the white hairs of seventy years, had such
blind confidence in Hulot--who, to the old Bonapartist, was an
emanation from the Napoleonic sun--that he was calmly pacing his
anteroom with the bank clerk, in the little ground-floor apartment
that he rented for eight hundred francs a year as the headquarters of
his extensive dealings in corn and forage.

"Marguerite is gone to fetch the money from close by," said he.

The official, in his gray uniform braided with silver, was so
convinced of the old Alsatian's honesty, that he was prepared to leave
the thirty thousand francs' worth of bills in his hands; but the old
man would not let him go, observing that the clock had not yet struck
eight. A cab drew up, the old man rushed into the street, and held out
his hand to the Baron with sublime confidence--Hulot handed him out
thirty thousand-franc notes.

"Go on three doors further, and I will tell you why," said Fischer.

"Here, young man," he said, returning to count out the money to the
bank emissary, whom he then saw to the door.

When the clerk was out of sight, Fischer called back the cab
containing his august nephew, Napoleon's right hand, and said, as he
led him into the house:

"You do not want them to know at the Bank of France that you paid me
the thirty thousand francs, after endorsing the bills?--It was bad
enough to see them signed by such a man as you!--"

"Come to the bottom of your little garden, Father Fischer," said the
important man. "You are hearty?" he went on, sitting down under a vine
arbor and scanning the old man from head to foot, as a dealer in human
flesh scans a substitute for the conscription.

"Ay, hearty enough for