ng to circulate paper to
pay your notes when they fall due,--a dangerous game. It is wiser to
step back for a better leap. The affair does not suit us."

This sentence struck Birotteau as if the executioner had stamped his
shoulder with the marking-iron; he lost his head.

"Come," said Adolphe, "my brother feels a great interest in you;
he spoke of you to me. Let us examine into your affairs," he added,
glancing at Cesar with the look of a courtesan eager to pay her rent.

Birotteau became Molineux,--a being at whom he had once laughed so
loftily. Enticed along by the banker,--who enjoyed disentangling
the bobbins of the poor man's thought, and who knew as well how to
cross-question a merchant as Popinot the judge knew how to make a
criminal betray himself,--Cesar recounted all his enterprises; he put
forward his Double Paste of Sultans and Carminative Balm, the Roguin
affair, and his lawsuit about the mortgage on which he had received
no money. As he watched the smiling, attentive face of Keller and the
motions of his head, Birotteau said to himself, "He is listening; I
interest him; I shall get my credit!" Adolphe Keller was laughing at
Cesar, just as Cesar had laughed at Molineux. Carried away by the lust
of speech peculiar to those who are made drunk by misfortune, Cesar
revealed his inner man; he gave his measure when he ended by offering
the security of Cephalic Oil and the firm of Popinot,--his last stake.
The worthy man, led on by false hopes, allowed Adolphe Keller to sound
and fathom him, and he stood revealed to the banker's eyes as a royalist
jackass on the point of failure. Delighted to foresee the bankruptcy of
a deputy-mayor of the arrondissement, an official just decorated, and
a man in power, Keller now curtly told Birotteau that he could neither
give him a credit nor say anything in his favor to his brother Francois.
If Francois gave way to idiotic generosity, and helped people of another
way of thinking from his own, men who were his political enemies, he,
Adolphe, would oppose with might and main any attempt to make a dupe of
him, and would prevent him from holding out a hand to the adversary of
Napoleon, wounded at Saint-Roch. Birotteau, exasperated, tried to
say something about the cupidity of the great banking-houses, their
harshness, their false philanthropy; but he was seized with so violent
a pain that he could scarcely stammer a few words about the Bank of
France, from which the Kellers were