he French Empire, and who seemed to him of
greater weight than thousands of soldiers; a man to whom nature, as a
rare privilege, had given a heart in a frame of bronze; mirthful and
kind at midnight amid women, and next morning manipulating Europe as
a young girl might amuse herself by splashing water in her bath!
Hypocritical and generous; loving tawdriness and simplicity; devoid of
taste, but protecting the arts; and in spite of these antitheses,
really great in everything by instinct or by temperament; Caesar at
five-and-twenty, Cromwell at thirty; and then, like my grocer buried in
Pere Lachaise, a good husband and a good father. In short, he improvised
public works, empires, kings, codes, verses, a romance--and all with
more range than precision. Did he not aim at making all Europe France?
And after making us weigh on the earth in such a way as to change the
laws of gravitation, he left us poorer than on the day when he first
laid hands on us; while he, who had taken an empire by his name, lost
his name on the frontier of his empire in a sea of blood and soldiers. A
man all thought and all action, who comprehended Desaix and Fouche."

"All despotism and all justice at the right moments. The true king!"
said de Marsay.

"Ah! vat a pleashre it is to dichest vile you talk," said Baron de
Nucingen.

"But do you suppose that the treat we are giving you is a common one?"
asked Joseph Bridau. "If you had to pay for the charms of conversation
as you do for those of dancing or of music, your fortune would be
inadequate! There is no second performance of the same flash of wit."

"And are we really so much deteriorated as these gentlemen think?" said
the Princesse de Cadignan, addressing the women with a smile at once
sceptical and ironical. "Because, in these days, under a regime which
makes everything small, you prefer small dishes, small rooms, small
pictures, small articles, small newspapers, small books, does that prove
that women too have grown smaller? Why should the human heart change
because you change your coat? In all ages the passions remain the same.
I know cases of beautiful devotion, of sublime sufferings, which lack
the publicity--the glory, if you choose--which formerly gave lustre to
the errors of some women. But though one may not have saved a King of
France, one is not the less an Agnes Sorel. Do you believe that our
dear Marquise d'Espard is not the peer of Madame Doublet, or Madame
du Deffant, in who