d Florine, simply.

"Well, the lawyer, du Tillet, and Raoul will each have to put up a
hundred thousand francs before they embark on the affair," replied
Blondet. "Then the paper can run eighteen months; about long enough for
a rise and fall in Paris."

Florine gave a little grimace of approval. The two friends jumped into
a cabriolet to go about collecting guests and pens, ideas and
self-interests.

Florine meantime sent for certain dealers in old furniture, bric-a-brac,
pictures, and jewels. These men entered her sanctuary and took an
inventory of every article, precisely as if Florine were dead. She
declared she would sell everything at public auction if they did not
offer her a proper price. She had had the luck to please, she said, an
English lord, and she wanted to get rid of all her property and look
poor, so that he might give her a fine house and furniture, fit to rival
the Rothschilds. But in spite of these persuasions and subterfuges, all
the dealers would offer her for a mass of belongings worth a hundred
and fifty thousand was seventy thousand. Florine thereupon offered to
deliver over everything in eight days for eighty thousand,--"To take
or leave," she said,--and the bargain was concluded. After the men
had departed she skipped for joy, like the hills of King David, and
performed all manner of follies, not having thought herself so rich.

When Raoul came back she made him a little scene, pretending to be hurt;
she declared that he abandoned her; that she had reflected; men did not
pass from one party to another, from the stage to the Chamber, without
some reason; there was a woman at the bottom; she had a rival! In short,
she made him swear eternal fidelity. Five days later she gave a splendid
feast. The new journal was baptized in floods of wine and wit, with
oaths of loyalty, fidelity, and good-fellowship. The name, forgotten
now like those of the Liberal, Communal, Departmental, Garde National,
Federal, Impartial, was something in "al" that was equally imposing and
evanescent. At three in the morning Florine could undress and go to bed
as if alone, though no one had left the house; these lights of the epoch
were sleeping the sleep of brutes. And when, early in the morning, the
packers and vans arrived to remove Florine's treasures she laughed to
see the porters moving the bodies of the celebrated men like pieces of
furniture that lay in their way. "Sic transit" all her fine things! all
her present