tch his fortune _quibus cumque viis_, and makes haste
to have done with villany, that he may spend the rest of his life as an
honest man.

With such methods, prosperity was rapid and brilliant; and in 1827
Charles Grandet returned to Bordeaux on the "Marie Caroline," a fine
brig belonging to a royalist house of business. He brought with him
nineteen hundred thousand francs worth of gold-dust, from which he
expected to derive seven or eight per cent more at the Paris mint.
On the brig he met a gentleman-in-ordinary to His Majesty Charles X.,
Monsieur d'Aubrion, a worthy old man who had committed the folly of
marrying a woman of fashion with a fortune derived from the West India
Islands. To meet the costs of Madame d'Aubrion's extravagance, he had
gone out to the Indies to sell the property, and was now returning with
his family to France.

Monsieur and Madame d'Aubrion, of the house of d'Aubrion de Buch, a
family of southern France, whose last _captal_, or chief, died before
1789, were now reduced to an income of about twenty thousand francs, and
they possessed an ugly daughter whom the mother was resolved to marry
without a _dot_,--the family fortune being scarcely sufficient for the
demands of her own life in Paris. This was an enterprise whose success
might have seemed problematical to most men of the world, in spite of
the cleverness with which such men credit a fashionable woman; in
fact, Madame d'Aubrion herself, when she looked at her daughter, almost
despaired of getting rid of her to any one, even to a man craving
connection with nobility. Mademoiselle d'Aubrion was a long, spare,
spindling demoiselle, like her namesake the insect; her mouth was
disdainful; over it hung a nose that was too long, thick at the end,
sallow in its normal condition, but very red after a meal,--a sort of
vegetable phenomenon which is particularly disagreeable when it appears
in the middle of a pale, dull, and uninteresting face. In one sense she
was all that a worldly mother, thirty-eight years of age and still
a beauty with claims to admiration, could have wished. However, to
counterbalance her personal defects, the marquise gave her daughter
a distinguished air, subjected her to hygienic treatment which
provisionally kept her nose at a reasonable flesh-tint, taught her the
art of dressing well, endowed her with charming manners, showed her the
trick of melancholy glances which interest a man and make him believe
that he has found