sieur Molineux
lives, to the Rue des Bourdonnais."

A cautious observer, or a merchant who had met with swindlers in
his business career, would have been saved by this sight; but the
antecedents of Birotteau, the incapacity of his mind, which had little
power to follow up the chain of inductions by which a superior
man reaches a conclusion, all conspired to blind him. He found the
umbrella-man in full dress, and they were about to start, when Virginie,
the cook, caught him by the arm:--

"Monsieur, madame does not wish you to go out--"

"Pshaw!" said Birotteau, "more women's notions!"

"--without your coffee, which is ready."

"That's true. My neighbor," he said to Cayron, "I have so many things
in my head that I can't think of my stomach. Do me the kindness to go
forward; we will meet at Monsieur Molineux' door, unless you are willing
to go up and explain matters to him, which would save time."

Monsieur Molineux was a grotesque little man, living on his rents,--a
species of being that exists nowhere but in Paris, like a certain lichen
which grows only in Iceland. This comparison is all the more apt because
he belonged to a mixed nature, to an animal-vegetable kingdom which
some modern Mercier might build up of cryptograms that push up upon, and
flower, and die in or under the plastered walls of the strange unhealthy
houses where they prefer to cluster. The first aspect of this human
plant--umbelliferous, judging by the fluted blue cap which crowned it,
with a stalk encased in greenish trousers, and bulbous roots swathed
in list shoes--offered to the eye a flat and faded countenance, which
certainly betrayed nothing poisonous. In this queer product might be
recognized the typical stockholder, who believes every report which the
daily press baptizes with ink, and is content, for all response, to say,
"Read what the papers say,"--the bourgeois, essentially the friend of
order, always revolting in his moral being against power, though
always obeying it; a creature feeble in the mass but fierce in isolated
circumstances, hard as a constable when his own rights are in question,
yet giving fresh chickweed to his bird and fish-bones to his cat,
interrupting the signing of a lease to whistle to a canary, suspicious
as a jailer, but apt to put his money into a bad business and then
endeavor to get it back by niggardly avarice. The evil savor of this
hybrid flower was only revealed by use; its nauseous bitterness needed
t