what she pleased; she was to be watched like a dangerous animal,
and she brought an element of liveliness into life, like Scapin,
Sganarelle, and Frontin in old-fashioned comedy. But a "rat" was too
expensive; it made no return in honor, profit, or pleasure; the fashion
of rats so completely went out, that in these days few people knew
anything of this detail of fashionable life before the Restoration till
certain writers took up the "rat" as a new subject.

"What! after having seen Coralie killed under him, Lucien means to rob
us of La Torpille?" (the torpedo fish) said Blondet.

As he heard the name the brawny mask gave a significant start, which,
though repressed, was understood by Rastignac.

"It is out of the question," replied Finot; "La Torpille has not a
sou to give away; Nathan tells me she borrowed a thousand francs of
Florine."

"Come, gentlemen, gentlemen!" said Rastignac, anxious to defend Lucien
against so odious an imputation.

"Well," cried Vernou, "is Coralie's kept man likely to be so very
particular?"

"Oh!" replied Bixiou, "those thousand francs prove to me that our friend
Lucien lives with La Torpille----"

"What an irreparable loss to literature, science, art, and politics!"
exclaimed Blondet. "La Torpille is the only common prostitute in whom I
ever found the stuff for a superior courtesan; she has not been spoiled
by education--she can neither read nor write, she would have understood
us. We might have given to our era one of those magnificent Aspasias
without which there can be no golden age. See how admirably Madame du
Barry was suited to the eighteenth century, Ninon de l'Enclos to the
seventeenth, Marion Delorme to the sixteenth, Imperia to the fifteenth,
Flora to Republican Rome, which she made her heir, and which paid off
the public debt with her fortune! What would Horace be without Lydia,
Tibullus without Delia, Catullus without Lesbia, Propertius without
Cynthia, Demetrius without Lamia, who is his glory at this day?"

"Blondet talking of Demetrius in the opera house seems to me rather too
strong of the _Debats_," said Bixiou in his neighbor's ears.

"And where would the empire of the Caesars have been but for these
queens?" Blondet went on; "Lais and Rhodope are Greece and Egypt. They
all indeed are the poetry of the ages in which they lived. This poetry,
which Napoleon lacked--for the Widow of his Great Army is a barrack
jest, was not wanting to the Revolution; it had Madame