the
beginning of the new year were manufactured, in the midst of the vilest
filth. Gigonnet eventually died, worth eighteen hundred thousand francs,
on a third floor of this house, from which no consideration could
move him; though his niece, Madame Saillard, offered to give him an
appartement in a hotel in the Place Royalle.

"Courage!" said Pillerault, as he pulled the deer's hoof hanging from
the bell-rope of Gigonnet's clean gray door.

Gigonnet opened the door himself. Cesar's two supporters, entering the
precincts of bankruptcy, crossed the first room, which was clean and
chilly and without curtains to its windows. All three sat down in the
inner room where the money-lender lived, before a hearth full of ashes,
in the midst of which the wood was successfully defending itself against
the fire. Popinot's courage froze at sight of the usurer's green boxes
and the monastic austerity of the room, whose atmosphere was like that
of a cellar. He looked with a wondering eye at the miserable blueish
paper sprinkled with tricolor flowers, which had been on the walls
for twenty-five years; and then his anxious glance fell upon the
chimney-piece, ornamented with a clock shaped like a lyre, and two oval
vases in Sevres blue richly mounted in copper-gilt. This relic, picked
up by Gigonnet after the pillage of Versailles, where the populace broke
nearly everything, came from the queen's boudoir; but these rare vases
were flanked by two candelabra of abject shape made of wrought-iron, and
the barbarous contrast recalled the circumstances under which the vases
had been acquired.

"I know that you have not come on your own account," said Gigonnet, "but
on behalf of the great Birotteau. Well, what is it, my friends?"

"We can tell you nothing that you do not already know; so I will be
brief," said Pillerault. "You have notes to the order of Claparon?"

"Yes."

"Will you exchange the first fifty thousand of those notes against the
notes of Monsieur Popinot, here present,--less the discount, of course?"

Gigonnet took off the terrible green cap which seemed to have been born
on him, pointed to his skull, denuded of hair and of the color of fresh
butter, made his usual Voltairean grimace, and said: "You wish to pay me
in hair-oil; have I any use for it?"

"If you choose to jest, there is nothing to be done but to beat a
retreat," said Pillerault.

"You speak like the wise man that you are," answered Gigonnet, with a
flatterin