uggling might be secretly encouraged.

"I am ruined, my dear Fischer; I must have a hundred thousand francs
within a year."

"I see no harm in getting it out of the Bedouins," said the Alsatian
calmly. "It was always done under the Empire----"

"The man who wants to buy your business will be here this morning, and
pay you ten thousand francs down," the Baron went on. "That will be
enough, I suppose, to take you to Africa?"

The old man nodded assent.

"As to capital out there, be quite easy. I will draw the remainder of
the money due if I find it necessary."

"All I have is yours--my very blood," said old Fischer.

"Oh, do not be uneasy," said Hulot, fancying that his uncle saw more
clearly than was the fact. "As to our excise dealings, your character
will not be impugned. Everything depends on the authority at your back;
now I myself appointed the authorities out there; I am sure of them.
This, Uncle Fischer, is a dead secret between us. I know you well, and I
have spoken out without concealment or circumlocution."

"It shall be done," said the old man. "And it will go on----?"

"For two years, You will have made a hundred thousand francs of your own
to live happy on in the Vosges."

"I will do as you wish; my honor is yours," said the little old man
quietly.

"That is the sort of man I like.--However, you must not go till you have
seen your grand-niece happily married. She is to be a Countess."

But even taxes and raids and the money paid by the War Office clerk for
Fischer's business could not forthwith provide sixty thousand francs to
give Hortense, to say nothing of her trousseau, which was to cost about
five thousand, and the forty thousand spent--or to be spent--on Madame
Marneffe.

Where, then had the Baron found the thirty thousand francs he had just
produced? This was the history.

A few days previously Hulot had insured his life for the sum of a
hundred and fifty thousand francs, for three years, in two separate
companies. Armed with the policies, of which he paid the premium, he had
spoken as follows to the Baron de Nucingen, a peer of the Chamber, in
whose carriage he found himself after a sitting, driving home, in fact,
to dine with him:--

"Baron, I want seventy thousand francs, and I apply to you. You must
find some one to lend his name, to whom I will make over the right to
draw my pay for three years; it amounts to twenty-five thousand francs a
year--that is, seventy-five thousand fr