nd francs, and letters of introduction for
Germany. We know Gobseck and Gigonnet and the other crocodiles; we could
have made them capitulate. But tell me, in the first place, what ass
ever led you to drink of that cursed spring."

"Des Lupeaulx."

The three young men looked at each other with one and the same thought
and suspicion, but they did not utter it.

"Explain all your resources; show us your hand," said de Marsay.

When Savinien had told of his mother and her old-fashioned ways, and the
little house with three windows in the Rue des Bourgeois, without other
grounds than a court for the well and a shed for the wood; when he had
valued the house, built of sandstone and pointed in reddish cement, and
put a price on the farm at Bordieres, the three dandies looked at each
other, and all three said with a solemn air the word of the abbe
in Alfred de Musset's "Marrons du feu" (which had then just
appeared),--"Sad!"

"Your mother will pay if you write a clever letter," said Rastignac.

"Yes, but afterwards?" cried de Marsay.

"If you had merely been put in the fiacre," said Lucien, "the government
would find you a place in diplomacy, but Saint-Pelagie isn't the
antechamber of an embassy."

"You are not strong enough for Parisian life," said Rastignac.

"Let us consider the matter," said de Marsay, looking Savinien over as a
jockey examines a horse. "You have fine blue eyes, well opened, a white
forehead well shaped, magnificent black hair, a little moustache which
suits those pale cheeks, and a slim figure; you've a foot that tells
race, shoulders and chest not quite those of a porter, but solid. You
are what I call an elegant male brunette. Your face is of the style
Louis XII., hardly any color, well-formed nose; and you have the thing
that pleases women, a something, I don't know what it is, which men take
no account of themselves; it is in the air, the manner, the tone of
the voice, the dart of the eye, the gesture,--in short, in a number of
little things which women see and to which they attach a meaning which
escapes us. You don't know your merits, my dear fellow. Take a certain
tone and style and in six months you'll captivate an English-woman with
a hundred thousand pounds; but you must call yourself viscount, a title
which belongs to you. My charming step-mother, Lady Dudley, who has not
her equal for matching two hearts, will find you some such woman in the
fens of Great Britain. What you must now d