"Follow qvick, fery qvick.--Tam you, you are ashleep!" he cried. "A
hundert franc if you catch up dat chaise."

At the words "A hundred francs," the coachman woke up. The servant
behind heard them, no doubt, in his dreams. The baron reiterated his
orders, the coachman urged the horses to a gallop, and at the Barriere
du Trone had succeeded in overtaking a carriage resembling that in which
Nucingen had seen the divine fair one, but which contained a swaggering
head-clerk from some first-class shop and a lady of the Rue Vivienne.

This blunder filled the Baron with consternation.

"If only I had prought Chorge inshtead of you, shtupid fool, he should
have fount dat voman," said he to the servant, while the excise officers
were searching the carriage.

"Indeed, Monsieur le Baron, the devil was behind the chaise, I believe,
disguised as an armed escort, and he sent this chaise instead of hers."

"Dere is no such ting as de Teufel," said the Baron.

The Baron de Nucingen owned to sixty; he no longer cared for women, and
for his wife least of all. He boasted that he had never known such love
as makes a fool of a man. He declared that he was happy to have done
with women; the most angelic of them, he frankly said, was not worth
what she cost, even if you got her for nothing. He was supposed to be so
entirely blase, that he no longer paid two thousand francs a month for
the pleasure of being deceived. His eyes looked coldly down from
his opera box on the corps de ballet; never a glance was shot at the
capitalist by any one of that formidable swarm of old young girls, and
young old women, the cream of Paris pleasure.

Natural love, artificial and love-of-show love, love based on
self-esteem and vanity, love as a display of taste, decent, conjugal
love, eccentric love--the Baron had paid for them all, had known them
all excepting real spontaneous love. This passion had now pounced down
on him like an eagle on its prey, as it did on Gentz, the confidential
friend of His Highness the Prince of Metternich. All the world knows
what follies the old diplomate committed for Fanny Elssler, whose
rehearsals took up a great deal more of his time than the concerns of
Europe.

The woman who had just overthrown that iron-bound money-box, called
Nucingen, had appeared to him as one of those who are unique in their
generation. It is not certain that Titian's mistress, or Leonardo da
Vinci's Monna Lisa, or Raphael's Fornarina were as bea