utiful as this
exquisite Esther, in whom not the most practised eye of the most
experienced Parisian could have detected the faintest trace of the
ordinary courtesan. The Baron was especially startled by the noble and
stately air, the air of a well-born woman, which Esther, beloved, and
lapped in luxury, elegance, and devotedness, had in the highest degree.
Happy love is the divine unction of women; it makes them all as lofty as
empresses.

For eight nights in succession the Baron went to the forest of
Vincennes, then to the Bois de Boulogne, to the woods of Ville-d'Avray,
to Meudon, in short, everywhere in the neighborhood of Paris, but failed
to meet Esther. That beautiful Jewish face, which he called "a face out
of te Biple," was always before his eyes. By the end of a fortnight he
had lost his appetite.

Delphine de Nucingen, and her daughter Augusta, whom the Baroness was
now taking out, did not at first perceive the change that had come over
the Baron. The mother and daughter only saw him at breakfast in the
morning and at dinner in the evening, when they all dined at home, and
this was only on the evenings when Delphine received company. But by
the end of two months, tortured by a fever of impatience, and in a state
like that produced by acute home-sickness, the Baron, amazed to find
his millions impotent, grew so thin, and seemed so seriously ill, that
Delphine had secret hopes of finding herself a widow. She pitied her
husband, somewhat hypocritically, and kept her daughter in seclusion.
She bored her husband with questions; he answered as Englishmen answer
when suffering from spleen, hardly a word.

Delphine de Nucingen gave a grand dinner every Sunday. She had chosen
that day for her receptions, after observing that no people of fashion
went to the play, and that the day was pretty generally an open one. The
emancipation of the shopkeeping and middle classes makes Sunday almost
as tiresome in Paris as it is deadly in London. So the Baroness invited
the famous Desplein to dinner, to consult him in spite of the sick man,
for Nucingen persisted in asserting that he was perfectly well.

Keller, Rastignac, de Marsay, du Tillet, all their friends had made the
Baroness understand that a man like Nucingen could not be allowed to die
without any notice being taken of it; his enormous business transactions
demanded some care; it was absolutely necessary to know where he stood.
These gentlemen also were asked to din