ary; my savings well-invested would have given me to-day ten thousand
francs a year outside of my office, and I might then have become,
through a good marriage--Yes, that is all true," he exclaimed,
interrupting himself, "but I have Celestine and my two children." The
man flung himself back on his happiness. To the best of married lives
there come moments of regret. He entered the salon and looked around
him. "There are not two women in Paris who understand making life
pleasant as she does. To keep such a home as this on twelve thousand
francs a year!" he thought, looking at the flower-stands bright with
bloom, and thinking of the social enjoyments that were about to gratify
his vanity. "She was made to be the wife of a minister. When I think of
his Excellency's wife, and how little she helps him! the good woman is a
comfortable middle-class dowdy, and when she goes to the palace or into
society--" He pinched his lips together. Very busy men are apt to have
very ignorant notions about household matters, and you can make them
believe that a hundred thousand francs afford little or that twelve
thousand afford all.

Though impatiently expected, and in spite of the flattering dishes
prepared for the palate of the gourmet-emeritus, des Lupeaulx did not
come to dinner; in fact he came in very late, about midnight, an
hour when company dwindles and conversations become intimate and
confidential. Andoche Finot, the journalist, was one of the few
remaining guests.

"I now know all," said des Lupeaulx, when he was comfortably seated on a
sofa at the corner of the fireplace, a cup of tea in his hand and Madame
Rabourdin standing before him with a plate of sandwiches and some slices
of cake very appropriately called "leaden cake." "Finot, my dear and
witty friend, you can render a great service to our gracious queen
by letting loose a few dogs upon the men we were talking of. You have
against you," he said to Rabourdin, lowering his voice so as to be
heard only by the three persons whom he addressed, "a set of usurers and
priests--money and the church. The article in the liberal journal
was instituted by an old money-lender to whom the paper was under
obligations; but the young fellow who wrote it cares nothing about it.
The paper is about to change hands, and in three days more will be on
our side. The royalist opposition,--for we have, thanks to Monsieur de
Chateaubriand, a royalist opposition, that is to say, royalists who
hav