point
of honor which consists in never derogating in the eyes of one's own
little public, which makes men on the Bourse commit crimes to escape
expulsion from the temple of the goddess Per-cent, and has given some
criminals courage enough to perform acts of virtue.

Lousteau dined and breakfasted and smoked as if he were a rich man. Not
for an inheritance would he have bought any but the dearest cigars, for
himself as well as for the playwright or author with whom he went into
the shop. The journalist took his walks abroad in patent leather boots;
but he was constantly afraid of an execution on goods which, to use the
bailiff's slang, had already received the last sacrament. Fanny Beaupre
had nothing left to pawn, and her salary was pledged to pay her
debts. After exhausting every possible advance of pay from newspapers,
magazines, and publishers, Etienne knew not of what ink he could churn
gold. Gambling-houses, so ruthlessly suppressed, could no longer, as of
old, cash I O U's drawn over the green table by beggary in despair. In
short, the journalist was reduced to such extremity that he had just
borrowed a hundred francs of the poorest of his friends, Bixiou, from
whom he had never yet asked for a franc. What distressed Lousteau was
not the fact of owing five thousand francs, but seeing himself bereft
of his elegance, and of the furniture purchased at the cost of so many
privations, and added to by Madame de la Baudraye.

On April the 3rd, a yellow poster, torn down by the porter after
being displayed on the wall, announced the sale of a handsome suite of
furniture on the following Saturday, the day fixed for sales under
legal authority. Lousteau was taking a walk, smoking cigars, and seeking
ideas--for, in Paris, ideas are in the air, they smile on you from a
street corner, they splash up with a spurt of mud from under the wheels
of a cab! Thus loafing, he had been seeking ideas for articles, and
subjects for novels for a month past, and had found nothing but friends
who carried him off to dinner or to the play, and who intoxicated his
woes, telling him that champagne would inspire him.

"Beware," said the virulent Bixiou one night, the man who would at the
same moment give a comrade a hundred francs and stab him to the heart
with a sarcasm; "if you go to sleep drunk every night, one day you will
wake up mad."

On the day before, the Friday, the unhappy wretch, although he was
accustomed to poverty, felt like a