on the third, accepted payable for a hundred and
twenty thousand francs--three hundred thousand francs in all. By writing
_Bon pour_, you simply promise to pay. The word _accepted_ constitutes
a bill of exchange, and makes you liable to imprisonment. The word
entails, on the person who is so imprudent as to sign, the risk of five
years' imprisonment--a punishment which the police magistrate hardly
ever inflicts, and which is reserved at the assizes for confirmed
rogues. The law of imprisonment for debt is a relic of the days of
barbarism, which combines with its stupidity the rare merit of being
useless, inasmuch as it never catches swindlers.

"The point," said the Spaniard to Esther, "is to get Lucien out of his
difficulties. We have debts to the tune of sixty thousand francs, and
with these three hundred thousand francs we may perhaps pull through."

Having antedated the bills by six months, Carlos had had them drawn on
Esther by a man whom the county court had "misunderstood," and whose
adventures, in spite of the excitement they had caused, were soon
forgotten, hidden, lost, in the uproar of the great symphony of July
1830.

This young fellow, a most audacious adventurer, the son of a lawyer's
clerk of Boulogne, near Paris, was named Georges Marie Destourny. His
father, obliged by adverse circumstances to sell his connection, died
in 1824, leaving his son without the means of living, after giving him
a brilliant education, the folly of the lower middle class. At
twenty-three the clever young law-student had denied his paternity by
printing on his cards

Georges d'Estourny.

This card gave him an odor of aristocracy; and now, as a man of fashion,
he was so impudent as to set up a tilbury and a groom and haunt the
clubs. One line will account for this: he gambled on the Bourse with the
money intrusted to him by the kept women of his acquaintance. Finally he
fell into the hands of the police, and was charged with playing at cards
with too much luck.

He had accomplices, youths whom he had corrupted, his compulsory
satellites, accessory to his fashion and his credit. Compelled to fly,
he forgot to pay his differences on the Bourse. All Paris--the Paris of
the Stock Exchange and Clubs--was still shaken by this double stroke of
swindling.

In the days of his splendor Georges d'Estourny, a handsome youth, and
above all, a jolly fellow, as generous as a brigand chief, had for a few
months "protected