man as the Baron de Nucingen cannot be happy incognito," replied
Corentin. "And besides, we for whom men are but cards, ought never to be
tricked by them."

"By gad! it would be the condemned jail-bird amusing himself by cutting
the executioner's throat."

"You always have something droll to say," replied Corentin, with a dim
smile, that faintly wrinkled his set white face.

This business was exceedingly important in itself, apart from its
consequences. If it were not the Baron who had betrayed Peyrade,
who could have had any interest in seeing the Prefet of Police? From
Corentin's point of view it seemed suspicious. Were there any traitors
among his men? And as he went to bed, he wondered what Peyrade, too, was
considering.

"Who can have gone to complain to the Prefet? Whom does the woman belong
to?"

And thus, without knowing each other, Jacques Collin, Peyrade, and
Corentin were converging to a common point; while the unhappy Esther,
Nucingen, and Lucien were inevitably entangled in the struggle which
had already begun, and of which the point of pride, peculiar to police
agents, was making a war to the death.

Thanks to Europe's cleverness, the more pressing half of the sixty
thousand francs of debt owed by Esther and Lucien was paid off. The
creditors did not even lose confidence. Lucien and his evil genius could
breathe for a moment. Like some pool, they could start again along the
edge of the precipice where the strong man was guiding the weak man to
the gibbet or to fortune.

"We are staking now," said Carlos to his puppet, "to win or lose all.
But, happily, the cards are beveled, and the punters young."

For some time Lucien, by his terrible Mentor's orders, had been very
attentive to Madame de Serizy. It was, in fact, indispensable that
Lucien should not be suspected of having kept a woman for his mistress.
And in the pleasure of being loved, and the excitement of fashionable
life, he found a spurious power of forgetting. He obeyed Mademoiselle
Clotilde de Grandlieu by never seeing her excepting in the Bois or the
Champs-Elysees.

On the day after Esther was shut up in the park-keeper's house, the
being who was to her so enigmatic and terrible, who weighed upon her
soul, came to desire her to sign three pieces of stamped paper, made
terrible by these fateful words: on the first, accepted payable for
sixty thousand francs; on the second, accepted payable for a hundred and
twenty thousand francs;