ercial police will never think of looking for her in her old rooms
which she left three months ago----"

"Feerst rate, feerst rate!" cried the Baron. "An' besides, I know dese
commercial police, an' I know vat sorts shall make dem disappear."

"You will find Eugenie a sharp customer," said Asie. "I found her for
madame."

"Hah! I know her!" cried the millionaire, laughing. "She haf fleeced me
out of dirty tousant franc."

Esther shuddered with horror in a way that would have led a man of any
feeling to trust her with his fortune.

"Oh, dat vas mein own fault," the Baron said. "I vas seeking for you."

And he related the incident that had arisen out of the letting of
Esther's rooms to the Englishwoman.

"There, now, you see, madame, Eugenie never told you all that, the sly
thing!" said Asie.--"Still, madame is used to the hussy," she added to
the Baron. "Keep her on, all the same."

She drew Nucingen aside and said:

"If you give Eugenie five hundred francs a month, which will fill up her
stocking finely, you can know everything that madame does: make her the
lady's-maid. Eugenie will be all the more devoted to you since she has
already done you.--Nothing attaches a woman to a man more than the fact
that she has once fleeced him. But keep a tight rein on Eugenie; she
will do any earthly thing for money; she is a dreadful creature!"

"An' vat of you?"

"I," said Asie, "I make both ends meet."

Nucingen, the astute financier, had a bandage over his eyes; he allowed
himself to be led like a child. The sight of that spotless and adorable
Esther wiping her eyes and pricking in the stitches of her embroidery
as demurely as an innocent girl, revived in the amorous old man the
sensations he had experienced in the Forest of Vincennes; he would
have given her the key of his safe. He felt so young, his heart was so
overflowing with adoration; he only waited till Asie should be gone to
throw himself at the feet of this Raphael's Madonna.

This sudden blossoming of youth in the heart of a stockbroker, of an old
man, is one of the social phenomena which must be left to physiology to
account for. Crushed under the burden of business, stifled under endless
calculations and the incessant anxieties of million-hunting, young
emotions revive with their sublime illusions, sprout and flower like
a forgotten cause or a forgotten seed, whose effects, whose gorgeous
bloom, are the sport of chance, brought out by a late and sudden