species, able
to live in holes full of old boots, pestiferous with rags, and ten
feet square; I want him such that he can live there all his life, sleep
there, eat there, be happy, get children as pretty as little cupids,
work, toil, cultivate flowers, sing there, stay there, and live in
darkness but see and know everything,' most assuredly the man of science
could never have invented the porter to oblige the proprietor; Paris,
and Paris only could create him, or, if you choose, the devil."

"Parisian creative powers have gone farther than that," said Gazonal;
"look at the workmen! You don't know all the products of industry,
though you exhibit them. Our toilers fight against the toilers of the
continent by force of misery, as Napoleon fought Europe by force of
regiments."

"Here we are, at my friend the usurer's," said Bixiou. "His name is
Vauvinet. One of the greatest mistakes made by writers who describe our
manners and morals is to harp on old portraits. In these days all trades
change. The grocer becomes a peer of France, artists capitalize their
money, vaudevillists have incomes. A few rare beings may remain what
they originally were, but professions in general have no longer either
their special costume or their formerly fixed habits and ways. In the
past we had Gobseck, Gigounet, Samonon,--the last of the Romans; to-day
we rejoice in Vauvinet, the good-fellow usurer, the dandy who frequents
the greenroom and the lorettes, and drives about in a little coupe with
one horse. Take special note of my man, friend Gazonal, and you'll see
the comedy of money, the cold man who won't give a penny, the hot man
who snuffs a profit; listen to him attentively!"

All three went up to the second floor of a fine-looking house on the
boulevard des Italiens, where they found themselves surrounded by the
elegances then in fashion. A young man about twenty-eight years of
age advanced to meet them with a smiling face, for he saw Leon de Lora
first. Vauvinet held out his hand with apparent friendliness to Bixiou,
and bowed coldly to Gazonal as he motioned them to enter his office,
where bourgeois taste was visible beneath the artistic appearance of the
furniture, and in spite of the statuettes and the thousand other little
trifles applied to our little apartments by modern art, which has made
itself as small as its patrons.

Vauvinet was dressed, like other young men of our day who go into
business, with extreme elegance, which ma