galleys.

Your friends here are not sparing you. The sister of the two
Vandenesses, the Marquise de Listomere and all her set, in which,
by the bye, that little Rastignac has enrolled himself,--the scamp
will make his way!--Madame d'Aiglemont and her salon, the
Lenoncourts, the Comtesse Ferraud, Madame d'Espard, the Nucingens,
the Spanish ambassador, in short, all the cliques in society are
flinging mud upon you. You are a bad man, a gambler, a dissipated
fellow who has squandered his property. After paying your debts a
great many times, your wife, an angel of virtue, has just redeemed
your notes for one hundred thousand francs, although her property
was separate from yours. Luckily, you had done the best you could
do by disappearing. If you had stayed here you would have made her
bed in the straw; the poor woman would have been the victim of her
conjugal devotion!

When a man attains to power, my dear Paul, he has all the virtues
of an epitaph; let him fall into poverty, and he has more sins
than the Prodigal Son; society at the present moment gives you the
vices of a Don Juan. You gambled at the Bourse, you had licentious
tastes which cost you fabulous sums of money to gratify; you paid
enormous interests to money-lenders. The two Vandenesses have told
everywhere how Gigonnet gave you for six thousand francs an ivory
frigate, and made your valet buy it back for three hundred in
order to sell it to you again. The incident did really happen to
Maxime de Trailles about nine years ago; but it fits your present
circumstances so well that Maxime has forever lost the command of
his frigate.

In short, I can't tell you one-half that is said; you have
supplied a whole encyclopaedia of gossip which the women have an
interest in swelling. Your wife is having an immense success. Last
evening at the opera Madame Firmiani began to repeat to me some of
the things that are being said. "Don't talk of that," I replied.
"You know nothing of the real truth, you people. Paul has robbed
the Bank, cheated the Treasury, murdered Ezzelin and three Medoras
in the rue Saint-Denis, and I think, between ourselves, that he is
a member of the Dix-Mille. His associate is the famous Jacques
Collin, on whom the police have been unable to lay a hand since he
escaped from the galleys. Paul gave him a room in his house; you
see he is capable of anything; in fact, the two hav