"Dinner is served, gentlemen," said the innkeeper.

"But where the devil can that young fellow have found the money? Is
the anonymous writer accurate? Can it be the earnings of some handsome
baggage?" said Derville, as they sat down to dinner.

"Ah, that will be the subject of another inquiry," said Corentin.
"Lucien de Rubempre, as the Duc de Chaulieu tells me, lives with a
converted Jewess, who passes for a Dutch woman, and is called Esther van
Bogseck."

"What a strange coincidence!" said the lawyer. "I am hunting for
the heiress of a Dutchman named Gobseck--it is the same name with a
transposition of consonants."

"Well," said Corentin, "you shall have information as to her parentage
on my return to Paris."

An hour later, the two agents for the Grandlieu family set out for La
Verberie, where Monsieur and Madame Sechard were living.

Never had Lucien felt any emotion so deep as that which overcame him at
La Verberie when comparing his own fate with that of his brother-in-law.
The two Parisians were about to witness the same scene that had so much
struck Lucien a few days since. Everything spoke of peace and abundance.

At the hour when the two strangers were arriving, a party of four
persons were being entertained in the drawing-room of La Verberie:
the cure of Marsac, a young priest of five-and-twenty, who, at Madame
Sechard's request, had become tutor to her little boy Lucien; the
country doctor, Monsieur Marron; the Maire of the commune; and an old
colonel, who grew roses on a plot of land opposite to La Verberie on the
other side of the road. Every evening during the winter these persons
came to play an artless game of boston for centime points, to borrow the
papers, or return those they had finished.

When Monsieur and Madame Sechard had bought La Verberie, a fine house
built of stone, and roofed with slate, the pleasure-grounds consisted of
a garden of two acres. In the course of time, by devoting her savings to
the purpose, handsome Madame Sechard had extended her garden as far as
a brook, by cutting down the vines on some ground she purchased, and
replacing them with grass plots and clumps of shrubbery. At the present
time the house, surrounded by a park of about twenty acres, and enclosed
by walls, was considered the most imposing place in the neighborhood.

Old Sechard's former residence, with the outhouses attached, was now
used as the dwelling-house for the manager of about twenty acres of