in my hands? A few bad mushrooms in a stew--and there an end. But
Mademoiselle Esther still lives!--and is happy!--And do you know why?
Because you love her. Do not be a fool. For four years we have been
waiting for a chance to turn up, for us or against us; well, it will
take something more than mere cleverness to wash the cabbage luck has
flung at us now. There are good and bad together in this turn of the
wheel--as there are in everything. Do you know what I was thinking of
when you came in?"

"No."

"Of making myself heir here, as I did at Barcelona, to an old bigot, by
Asie's help."

"A crime?"

"I saw no other way of securing your fortune. The creditors are making
a stir. If once the bailiffs were at your heels, and you were turned out
of the Hotel Grandlieu, where would you be? There would be the devil to
pay then."

And Carlos Herrera, by a pantomimic gesture, showed the suicide of a man
throwing himself into the water; then he fixed on Lucien one of those
steady, piercing looks by which the will of a strong man is injected,
so to speak, into a weak one. This fascinating glare, which relaxed
all Lucien's fibres of resistance, revealed the existence not merely
of secrets of life and death between him and his adviser, but also of
feelings as far above ordinary feeling as the man himself was above his
vile position.

Carlos Herrera, a man at once ignoble and magnanimous, obscure and
famous, compelled to live out of the world from which the law had banned
him, exhausted by vice and by frenzied and terrible struggles, though
endowed with powers of mind that ate into his soul, consumed especially
by a fever of vitality, now lived again in the elegant person of Lucien
de Rubempre, whose soul had become his own. He was represented in social
life by the poet, to whom he lent his tenacity and iron will. To him
Lucien was more than a son, more than a woman beloved, more than a
family, more than his life; he was his revenge; and as souls cling more
closely to a feeling than to existence, he had bound the young man to
him by insoluble ties.

After rescuing Lucien's life at the moment when the poet in desperation
was on the verge of suicide, he had proposed to him one of those
infernal bargains which are heard of only in romances, but of which
the hideous possibility has often been proved in courts of justice by
celebrated criminal dramas. While lavishing on Lucien all the delights
of Paris life, and proving to hi