although consumed
with anxiety lest he had lost a rare chance, he would have cut off a leg
sooner than yield to his impulse to go to her one minute before the hour
he had fixed. The information he obtained about her in the quarter
was rather contradictory. Some said his client was a saint; otherwise
declared her to be a sly creature; but, on the whole, nothing was said
against her morality that deterred la Peyrade from taking the piece of
luck she had offered him.

When he met her at four o'clock he found her in the same mind.

With the money in his pocket he went to dine with Cerizet and Dutocq at
the Rocher de Cancale; and it is to the various emotions he had
passed through during the day that we must attribute the sharp and
ill-considered manner in which he conducted his rupture with his two
associates. This behavior was neither that of his natural disposition
nor of his acquired temperament; but the money that was burning in his
pockets had slightly intoxicated him; its very touch had conveyed to
him an excitement and an impatience for emancipation of which he was not
wholly master. He flung Cerizet over in the matter of the lease without
so much as consulting Brigitte; and yet, he had not had the full courage
of his duplicity; for he had laid to the charge of the old woman a
refusal which was merely the act of his own will, prompted by bitter
recollections of his fruitless struggles with the man who had so long
oppressed him.

In short, during the whole day, la Peyrade had not shown himself the
able and infallible man that we have hitherto seen him. Once before,
when he carried the fifteen thousand francs entrusted to him by
Thuillier, he had been led by Cerizet into an insurrectionary proceeding
which necessitated the affair of Sauvaignou. Perhaps, on the whole, it
is more difficult to be strong under good than under evil fortune. The
Farnese Hercules, calm and in still repose, expresses more energetically
the plenitude of muscular power than a violent and agitated Hercules
represented in the over-excited energy of his labors.

PART II. THE PARVENUS

CHAPTER I. PHELLION, UNDER A NEW ASPECT

Between the first and second parts of this history an immense event had
taken place in the life of Phellion.

There is no one who has not heard of the misfortunes of the Odeon,
that fatal theatre which, for years, ruined all its directors. Right
or wrong, the quarter in which this dramatic impossibility s