some one there will
care for all letters that come to me from Europe. Dear friend, I
hope to find you the same de Marsay on my return,--the man who
scoffs at everything and yet is receptive of the feelings of
others when they accord with the grandeur he is conscious of in
himself. You stay in Paris, friend; but when you read these words,
I shall be crying out, "To Carthage!"

The Marquis Henri de Marsay to Comte Paul de Manerville:

So, so, Monsieur le comte, you have made a wreck of it! Monsieur
l'ambassadeur has gone to the bottom! Are these the fine things
that you were doing?

Why, Paul, why have you kept away from me? If you had said a
single word, my poor old fellow, I would have made your position
plain to you. Your wife has refused me her endorsement. May that
one word unseal your eyes! But, if that does not suffice, learn
that your notes have been protested at the instigation of a Sieur
Lecuyer, formerly head-clerk to Maitre Solonet, a notary in
Bordeaux. That usurer in embryo (who came from Gascony for
jobbery) is the proxy of your very honorable mother-in-law, who is
the actual holder of your notes for one hundred thousand francs,
on which I am told that worthy woman doled out to you only seventy
thousand. Compared with Madame Evangelista, papa Gobseck is
flannel, velvet, vanilla cream, a sleeping draught. Your vineyard
of Belle-Rose is to fall into the clutches of your wife, to whom
her mother pays the difference between the price it goes for at
the auction sale and the amount of her dower claim upon it. Madame
Evangelista will also have the farms at Guadet and Grassol, and
the mortgages on your house in Bordeaux already belong to her, in
the names of straw men provided by Solonet.

Thus these two excellent women will make for themselves a united
income of one hundred and twenty thousand francs a year out of
your misfortunes and forced sale of property, added to the revenue
of some thirty-odd thousand on the Grand-livre which these cats
already possess.

The endorsement of your wife was not needed; for this morning the
said Sieur Lecuyer came to offer me a return of the sum I had lent
you in exchange for a legal transfer of my rights. The vintage of
1825 which your mother-in-law keeps in the cellars at Lanstrac
will suffice to pay me.

These two women have calculated, evidently, that you are now upon
the ocean; but I