or for Mademoiselle de
Grandlieu; and he had just bought up the lands of Rubempre at the cost
of a million francs.

Corentin very skilfully made the head of the General Police take the
first steps; and the Prefet de Police a propos to Peyrade, informed his
chief that the appellants in that affair had been in fact the Comte de
Serizy and Lucien de Rubempre.

"We have it!" cried Peyrade and Corentin.

The two friends had laid plans in a moment.

"This hussy," said Corentin, "has had intimacies; she must have some
women friends. Among them we shall certainly find one or another who is
down on her luck; one of us must play the part of a rich foreigner and
take her up. We will throw them together. They always want something of
each other in the game of lovers, and we shall then be in the citadel."

Peyrade naturally proposed to assume his disguise as an Englishman.
The wild life he should lead during the time that he would take to
disentangle the plot of which he had been the victim, smiled on his
fancy; while Corentin, grown old in his functions, and weakly too,
did not care for it. Disguised as a mulatto, Contenson at once evaded
Carlos' force. Just three days before Peyrade's meeting with Madame du
Val-Noble in the Champs-Elysees, this last of the agents employed by
MM. de Sartine and Lenoir had arrived, provided with a passport, at the
Hotel Mirabeau, Rue de la Paix, having come from the Colonies via le
Havre, in a traveling chaise, as mud-splashed as though it had really
come from le Havre, instead of no further than by the road from
Saint-Denis to Paris.

Carlos Herrera, on his part, had his passport _vise_ at the Spanish
Embassy, and arranged everything at the Quai Malaquais to start for
Madrid. And this is why. Within a few days Esther was to become the
owner of the house in the Rue Saint-Georges and of shares yielding
thirty thousand francs a year; Europe and Asie were quite cunning enough
to persuade her to sell these shares and privately transmit the money
to Lucien. Thus Lucien, proclaiming himself rich through his sister's
liberality, would pay the remainder of the price of the Rubempre
estates. Of this transaction no one could complain. Esther alone could
betray herself; but she would die rather than blink an eyelash.

Clotilde had appeared with a little pink kerchief round her crane's
neck, so she had won her game at the Hotel de Grandlieu. The shares
in the Omnibus Company were already worth thrice th