thing, and conducting
your affairs with judgment. Be steady, be respectable, have a wife, and
children, pay your rent and taxes, serve in the National Guard, and be
on the same pattern as all the men of your company--then you may indulge
in the loftiest pretensions, rise to the Ministry!--and you have the
best chances possible, since you are no Montmorency. You were preparing
to fulfil all the conditions insisted on for turning out a political
personage, you are capable of every mean trick that is necessary in
office, even of pretending to be commonplace--you would have acted it to
the life. And just for a woman, who will leave you in the lurch--the
end of every eternal passion--in three, five, or seven years--after
exhausting your last physical and intellectual powers, you turn your
back on the sacred Hearth, on the Rue des Lombards, on a political
career, on thirty thousand francs per annum, on respectability and
respect!--Ought that to be the end of a man who has done with illusions?

"If you had kept a pot boiling for some actress who gave you your fun
for it--well; that is what you may call a cabinet matter. But to live
with another man's wife? It is a draft at sight on disaster; it is
bolting the bitter pills of vice with none of the gilding."

"That will do. One word answers it all; I love Madame de la Baudraye,
and prefer her to every fortune, to every position the world can
offer.--I may have been carried away by a gust of ambition, but
everything must give way to the joy of being a father."

"Ah, ha! you have a fancy for paternity? But, wretched man, we are the
fathers only of our legitimate children. What is a brat that does not
bear your name? The last chapter of the romance.--Your child will be
taken from you! We have seen that story in twenty plays these ten years
past.

"Society, my dear boy, will drop upon you sooner or later. Read
_Adolphe_ once more.--Dear me! I fancy I can see you when you and
she are used to each other;--I see you dejected, hang-dog, bereft of
position and fortune, and fighting like the shareholders of a bogus
company when they are tricked by a director!--Your director is
happiness."

"Say no more, Bixiou."

"But I have only just begun," said Bixiou. "Listen, my dear boy.
Marriage has been out of favor for some time past; but, apart from the
advantages it offers in being the only recognized way of certifying
heredity, as it affords a good-looking young man, though penniless, t