arneffe had got
her circle together with prudent deliberation; only men whose opinions
and habits agreed foregathered there, men whose interest it was to
hold together and to proclaim the many merits of the lady of the house.
Scandal is the true Holy Alliance in Paris. Take that as an axiom.
Interests invariably fall asunder in the end; vicious natures can always
agree.

Within three months of settling in the Rue Vanneau, Madame Marneffe
had entertained Monsieur Crevel, who by that time was Mayor of his
_arrondissement_ and Officer of the Legion of Honor. Crevel had
hesitated; he would have to give up the famous uniform of the National
Guard in which he strutted at the Tuileries, believing himself quite
as much a soldier as the Emperor himself; but ambition, urged by Madame
Marneffe, had proved stronger than vanity. Then Monsieur le Maire had
considered his connection with Mademoiselle Heloise Brisetout as quite
incompatible with his political position.

Indeed, long before his accession to the civic chair of the Mayoralty,
his gallant intimacies had been wrapped in the deepest mystery. But,
as the reader may have guessed, Crevel had soon purchased the right of
taking his revenge, as often as circumstances allowed, for having been
bereft of Josepha, at the cost of a bond bearing six thousand francs of
interest in the name of Valerie Fortin, wife of Sieur Marneffe, for her
sole and separate use. Valerie, inheriting perhaps from her mother the
special acumen of the kept woman, read the character of her grotesque
adorer at a glance. The phrase "I never had a lady for a mistress,"
spoken by Crevel to Lisbeth, and repeated by Lisbeth to her dear
Valerie, had been handsomely discounted in the bargain by which she got
her six thousand francs a year in five per cents. And since then she had
never allowed her prestige to grow less in the eyes of Cesar Birotteau's
erewhile bagman.

Crevel himself had married for money the daughter of a miller of la
Brie, an only child indeed, whose inheritance constituted three-quarters
of his fortune; for when retail-dealers grow rich, it is generally not
so much by trade as through some alliance between the shop and rural
thrift. A large proportion of the farmers, corn-factors, dairy-keepers,
and market-gardeners in the neighborhood of Paris, dream of the glories
of the desk for their daughters, and look upon a shopkeeper, a jeweler,
or a money-changer as a son-in-law after their own heart,