their
vicissitudes, caused as they so often are by maladies? Physical evil,
considered under the aspect of its moral ravages, examined as to
its influence upon the mechanism of life, has been perhaps too much
neglected by the historians of the social kingdom. Madame Cesar had
guessed the secret of Roguin's household.

From the night of her marriage, the charming and only daughter of
the banker Chevrel conceived for the unhappy notary an insurmountable
antipathy, and wished to apply at once for a divorce. But Roguin, happy
in obtaining a rich wife with five hundred thousand francs of her own,
to say nothing of expectations, entreated her not to institute an
action for divorce, promising to leave her free, and to accept all the
consequences of such an agreement. Madame Roguin thus became sovereign
mistress of the situation, and treated her husband as a courtesan treats
an elderly lover. Roguin soon found his wife too expensive, and like
other Parisian husbands he set up a private establishment of his own,
keeping the cost, in the first instance, within the limits of moderate
expenditure. In the beginning he encountered, at no great expense,
grisettes who were glad of his protection; but for the past three
years he had fallen a prey to one of those unconquerable passions which
sometimes invade the whole being of a man between fifty and sixty years
of age. It was roused by a magnificent creature known as _la belle
Hollandaise_ in the annals of prostitution, for into that gulf she was
to fall back and become a noted personage through her death. She was
originally brought from Bruges by a client of Roguin, who soon after
left Paris in consequence of political events, presenting her to the
notary in 1815. Roguin bought a house for her in the Champs-Elysees,
furnished it handsomely, and in trying to satisfy her costly caprices
had gradually eaten up his whole fortune.

The gloomy look on the notary's face, which he hastened to lay aside
when he saw Birotteau, grew out of certain mysterious circumstances
which were at the bottom of the secret fortune so rapidly acquired by du
Tillet. The scheme originally planned by that adventurer had changed
on the first Sunday when he saw, at Birotteau's house, the relations
existing between Monsieur and Madame Roguin. He had come there not so
much to seduce Madame Cesar as to obtain the offer of her daughter's
hand by way of compensation for frustrated hopes, and he found little
difficult