by usury, after Cerizet's own fashion; for the sum he
paid for the house was forty thousand francs, while his investment in
1830 was forty-eight thousand more. His niece, deceived by the old man
as much as he deceived the functionaries and the pious souls of the
church, believed him the most miserable of paupers, and when she had any
fish that were spoiling she sometimes took them to the aged beggar.

Consequently, she now felt it her right to get what she could in return
for her pity and her liberality to an uncle who was likely to have
a crowd of collateral heirs; she herself being the third and last
Toupillier daughter. She had four brothers, and her father, a porter
with a hand-cart, had told her, in her childhood, of three aunts and
four uncles, who all led an existence of the baser sort.

After inspecting the sick man, she went, at full speed, to consult
Cerizet, telling him, in the first place, how she had found her
daughter, and then the reasons and indications which made her think that
her uncle Toupillier was hoarding a pile of gold in his mattress. Mere
Cardinal did not feel herself strong enough to seize upon the property,
legally or illegally, and she therefore came to confide in Cerizet and
get his advice.

So, then, the banker of the poor, like other scavengers, had, at last,
found diamonds in the slime in which he had paddled for the last four
years, being always on the watch for some such chance,--a chance,
they say, occasionally met with in the purlieus, which give birth to
heiresses in sabots. This was the secret of his unexpected gentleness to
la Peyrade, the man whose ruin he had vowed. It is easy to imagine the
anxiety with which he awaited the return of Madame Cardinal, to whom
this wily schemer of nefarious plots had given means to verify her
suspicions as to the existence of the hoarded treasure, promising her
complete success if she would trust him to obtain for her so rich a
harvest. He was not the man to shrink from a crime, above all, when he
saw that others could commit it, while he obtained the benefits.

"Well, monsieur," cried the fishwife, entering Cerizet's den with a face
as much inflamed by cupidity as by the haste of her movements, "my uncle
sleeps on more than a hundred thousand francs in gold, and I am certain
that those Perraches, by dint of nursing him, have smelt the rat."

"Shared among forty heirs that won't be much to each," said Cerizet.
"Listen to me, Mere Cardinal: I