"Leave it all to me," said the woman; "your vengeance is simmering."

She looked at the clock; it was six.

"Your avenger is dressing; the fires are lighted at the _Rocher de
Cancale_; the horses are pawing the ground; my irons are getting hot.
--Oh, I know your Madame Marneffe by heart!--Everything is ready. And
there are some boluses in the rat-trap; I will tell you to-morrow
morning if the mouse is poisoned. I believe she will be; good evening,
my son."

"Good-bye, madame."

"Do you know English?"

"Yes."

"Well, my son, thou shalt be King. That is to say, you shall come into
your inheritance," said the dreadful old witch, foreseen by
Shakespeare, and who seemed to know her Shakespeare.

She left Hulot amazed at the door of his study.

"The consultation is for to-morrow!" said she, with the gracious air
of a regular client.

She saw two persons coming, and wished to pass in their eyes a
pinchbeck countess.

"What impudence!" thought Hulot, bowing to his pretended client.

Baron Montes de Montejanos was a _lion_, but a lion not accounted for.
Fashionable Paris, Paris of the turf and of the town, admired the
ineffable waistcoats of this foreign gentleman, his spotless
patent-leather boots, his incomparable sticks, his much-coveted horses,
and the negro servants who rode the horses and who were entirely slaves
and most consumedly thrashed.

His fortune was well known; he had a credit account up to seven
hundred thousand francs in the great banking house of du Tillet; but
he was always seen alone. When he went to "first nights," he was in a
stall. He frequented no drawing-rooms. He had never given his arm to a
girl on the streets. His name would not be coupled with that of any
pretty woman of the world. To pass his time he played whist at the
Jockey-Club. The world was reduced to calumny, or, which it thought
funnier, to laughing at his peculiarities; he went by the name of
Combabus.

Bixiou, Leon de Lora, Lousteau, Florine, Mademoiselle Heloise
Brisetout, and Nathan, supping one evening with the notorious
Carabine, with a large party of _lions_ and _lionesses_, had invented
this name with an excessively burlesque explanation. Massol, as being
on the Council of State, and Claude Vignon, erewhile Professor of
Greek, had related to the ignorant damsels the famous anecdote,
preserved in Rollin's _Ancient History_, concerning Combabus, that
voluntary Abelard who was placed in charge of the wife of a