u."

"Den I am your man."

"You know the Kellers?"

"Oh! ver' well."

"Francois Keller is the Comte de Gondreville's son-in-law, and the Comte
de Gondreville and his son-in-law dined with you yesterday."

"Who der teufel tolt you dat?" cried the Baron. "Dat vill be Georche;
he is always a gossip." Peyrade smiled, and the banker at once formed
strange suspicions of his man-servant.

"The Comte de Gondreville is quite in a position to obtain me a place I
covet at the Prefecture of Police; within forty-eight hours the prefet
will have notice that such a place is to be created," said Peyrade
in continuation. "Ask for it for me; get the Comte de Gondreville to
interest himself in the matter with some degree of warmth--and you will
thus repay me for the service I am about to do you. I ask your word
only; for, if you fail me, sooner or later you will curse the day you
were born--you have Peyrade's word for that."

"I gif you mein vort of honor to do vat is possible."

"If I do no more for you than is possible, it will not be enough."

"Vell, vell, I vill act qvite frankly."

"Frankly--that is all I ask," said Peyrade, "and frankness is the only
thing at all new that you and I can offer to each other."

"Frankly," echoed the Baron. "Vere shall I put you down."

"At the corner of the Pont Louis XVI."

"To the Pont de la Chambre," said the Baron to the footman at the
carriage door.

"Then I am to get dat unknown person," said the Baron to himself as he
drove home.

"What a queer business!" thought Peyrade, going back on foot to the
Palais-Royal, where he intended trying to multiply his ten thousand
francs by three, to make a little fortune for Lydie. "Here I am required
to look into the private concerns of a very young man who has bewitched
my little girl by a glance. He is, I suppose, one of those men who
have an eye for a woman," said he to himself, using an expression of
a language of his own, in which his observations, or Corentin's, were
summed up in words that were anything rather than classical, but, for
that very reason, energetic and picturesque.

The Baron de Nucingen, when he went in, was an altered man; he
astonished his household and his wife by showing them a face full of
life and color, so cheerful did he feel.

"Our shareholders had better look out for themselves," said du Tillet to
Rastignac.

They were all at tea, in Delphine de Nucingen's boudoir, having come in
from the opera.

"Ja,"