utiful clothes in
that hideous condition when they have ceased to be dresses and are not
yet rags.

The setting was in harmony with the appearance assumed by the woman,
for these shops are among the most hideous characteristics of Paris. You
find there the garments tossed aside by the skinny hand of Death; you
hear, as it were, the gasping of consumption under a shawl, or you
detect the agonies of beggery under a gown spangled with gold. The
horrible struggle between luxury and starvation is written on filmy
laces; you may picture the countenance of a queen under a plumed turban
placed in an attitude that recalls and almost reproduces the absent
features. It is all hideous amid prettiness! Juvenal's lash, in the
hands of the appraiser, scatters the shabby muffs, the ragged furs of
courtesans at bay.

There is a dunghill of flowers, among which here and there we find a
bright rose plucked but yesterday and worn for a day; and on this an old
hag is always to be seen crouching--first cousin to Usury, the skinflint
bargainer, bald and toothless, and ever ready to sell the contents, so
well is she used to sell the covering--the gown without the woman, or
the woman without the gown!

Here Asie was in her element, like the warder among convicts, like a
vulture red-beaked amid corpses; more terrible than the savage horrors
that made the passer-by shudder in astonishment sometimes, at seeing
one of their youngest and sweetest reminiscences hung up in a dirty shop
window, behind which a Saint-Esteve sits and grins.

From vexation to vexation, a thousand francs at a time, the banker had
gone so far as to offer sixty thousand francs to Madame de Saint-Esteve,
who still refused to help him, with a grimace that would have outdone
any monkey. After a disturbed night, after confessing to himself that
Esther completely upset his ideas, after realizing some unexpected turns
of fortune on the Bourse, he came to her one day, intending to give the
hundred thousand francs on which Asie insisted, but he was determined to
have plenty of information for the money.

"Well, have you made up your mind, old higgler?" said Asie, clapping him
on the shoulder.

The most dishonoring familiarity is the first tax these women levy on
the frantic passions or griefs that are confided to them; they never
rise to the level of their clients; they make them seem squat beside
them on their mudheap. Asie, it will be seen, obeyed her master
admirably.

"