-looked grave.

"Be quite easy; I only raised the question to show you that I was not
devoid of merit in handing you the sum. Are you so short of cash? for
the Bank will take your signature."

"My daughter is to be married," said Baron Hulot, "and I have no
fortune--like every one else who remains in office in these thankless
times, when five hundred ordinary men seated on benches will never
reward the men who devote themselves to the service as handsomely as
the Emperor did."

"Well, well; but you had Josepha on your hands!" replied Nucingen,
"and that accounts for everything. Between ourselves, the Duc
d'Herouville has done you a very good turn by removing that leech from
sucking your purse dry. 'I have known what that is, and can pity your
case,'" he quoted. "Take a friend's advice: Shut up shop, or you will
be done for."

This dirty business was carried out in the name of one Vauvinet, a
small money-lender; one of those jobbers who stand forward to screen
great banking houses, like the little fish that is said to attend the
shark. This stock-jobber's apprentice was so anxious to gain the
patronage of Monsieur le Baron Hulot, that he promised the great man
to negotiate bills of exchange for thirty thousand francs at eighty
days, and pledged himself to renew them four times, and never pass
them out of his hands.

Fischer's successor was to pay forty thousand francs for the house and
the business, with the promise that he should supply forage to a
department close to Paris.

This was the desperate maze of affairs into which a man who had
hitherto been absolutely honest was led by his passions--one of the
best administrative officials under Napoleon--peculation to pay the
money-lenders, and borrowing of the money-lenders to gratify his
passions and provide for his daughter. All the efforts of this
elaborate prodigality were directed at making a display before Madame
Marneffe, and to playing Jupiter to this middle-class Danae. A man
could not expend more activity, intelligence, and presence of mind in
the honest acquisition of a fortune than the Baron displayed in
shoving his head into a wasp's nest: He did all the business of his
department, he hurried on the upholsterers, he talked to the workmen,
he kept a sharp lookout on the smallest details of the house in the
Rue Vanneau. Wholly devoted to Madame Marneffe, he nevertheless
attended the sittings of the Chambers; he was everywhere at once, and
neither his fa