Baron had
spent three times as much there as your poor Falleix."

"Let us go round to her box," said Tullia.

"Not if I know it," said Mariette; "she is much too handsome, I will
call on her at home."

"I think myself good-looking enough to risk it," remarked Tullia.

So the much-daring leading dancer went round between the acts and
renewed acquaintance with Esther, who would talk only on general
subjects.

"And where have you come back from, my dear child?" asked Tullia, who
could not restrain her curiosity.

"Oh, I was for five years in a castle in the Alps with an Englishman, as
jealous as a tiger, a nabob; I called him a nabot, a dwarf, for he was
not so big as le bailli de Ferrette.

"And then I came across a banker--from a savage to salvation, as Florine
might say. And now here I am in Paris again; I long so for amusement
that I mean to have a rare time. I shall keep open house. I have five
years of solitary confinement to make good, and I am beginning to do
it. Five years of an Englishman is rather too much; six weeks are the
allowance according to the advertisements."

"Was it the Baron who gave you that lace?"

"No, it is a relic of the nabob.--What ill-luck I have, my dear! He was
as yellow as a friend's smile at a success; I thought he would be dead
in ten months. Pooh! he was a strong as a mountain. Always distrust men
who say they have a liver complaint. I will never listen to a man who
talks of his liver.--I have had too much of livers--who cannot die. My
nabob robbed me; he died without making a will, and the family turned me
out of doors like a leper.--So, then, I said to my fat friend here, 'Pay
for two!'--You may as well call me Joan of Arc; I have ruined England,
and perhaps I shall die at the stake----"

"Of love?" said Tullia.

"And burnt alive," answered Esther, and the question made her
thoughtful.

The Baron laughed at all this vulgar nonsense, but he did not always
follow it readily, so that his laughter sounded like the forgotten
crackers that go off after fireworks.

We all live in a sphere of some kind, and the inhabitants of every
sphere are endowed with an equal share of curiosity.

Next evening at the opera, Esther's reappearance was the great news
behind the scenes. Between two and four in the afternoon all Paris in
the Champs-Elysees had recognized La Torpille, and knew at last who was
the object of the Baron de Nucingen's passion.

"Do you know," Blondet remarke