oul, and he made me uncomfortable at that beautiful ball
you gave us. I can't stand his impudent airs--all because he has got
a notary's wife! I could have countesses if I wanted them; I sha'n't
respect him any the more for that. Ah! my respect is a princess who'll
never give birth to such as he. But, I say, you are a funny fellow, old
man, to flash us a ball like that, and two months after try to renew
your paper! You seem to have some go in you. Let's do business together.
You have got a reputation which would be very useful to me. Oh! du
Tillet was born to understand Gobseck. Du Tillet will come to a bad end
at the Bourse. If he is, as they say, the tool of old Gobseck, he won't
be allowed to go far. Gobseck sits in a corner of his web like an old
spider who has travelled round the world. Sooner or later, ztit! the
usurer will toss him off as I do this glass of wine. So much the better!
Du Tillet has played me a trick--oh! a damnable trick."

At the end of an hour and a half spend in just such senseless chatter,
Birotteau attempted to get away, seeing that the late commercial
traveller was about to relate the adventure of a republican deputy of
Marseilles, in love with a certain actress then playing the part of la
belle Arsene, who, on one occasion, was hissed by a royalist crowd in
the pit.

"He stood up in his box," said Claparon, "and shouted: 'Arrest whoever
hissed her! Eugh! If it's a woman, I'll kiss her; if it's a man, we'll
see about it; if it's neither the one nor the other, may God's lightning
blast it!' Guess how it ended."

"Adieu, monsieur," said Birotteau.

"You will have to come and see me," said Claparon; "that first scrap of
paper you gave Cayron has come back to us protested; I endorsed it, so
I've paid it. I shall send after you; business before everything."

Birotteau felt stabbed to the heart by this cold and grinning kindness
as much as by the harshness of Keller or the coarse German banter of
Nucingen. The familiarity of the man, and his grotesque gabble excited
by champagne, seemed to tarnish the soul of the honest bourgeois as
though he came from a house of financial ill-fame. He went down the
stairway and found himself in the streets without knowing where he
was going. As he walked along the boulevards and reached the Rue
Saint-Denis, he recollected Molineux, and turned into the Cour Batave.
He went up the dirty, tortuous staircase which he once trod so proudly.
He recalled to mind the