ith me now to Monsieur
Crottat, only two steps from here."

"Before a notary?"

"Monsieur; I am not forbidden to aim at my complete reinstatement; to
obtain it, all deeds and receipts must be legal and undeniable."

"Come, then," said du Tillet, going out with Birotteau; "it is only a
step. But where did you take all that money from?"

"I have not taken it," said Cesar; "I have earned it by the sweat of my
brow."

"You owe an enormous sum to Claparon."

"Alas! yes; that is my largest debt. I think sometimes I shall die
before I pay it."

"You never can pay it," said du Tillet harshly.

"He is right," thought Birotteau.

As he went home the poor man passed, inadvertently, along the Rue
Saint-Honore; for he was in the habit of making a circuit to avoid
seeing his shop and the windows of his former home. For the first time
since his fall he saw the house where eighteen years of happiness had
been effaced by the anguish of three months.

"I hoped to end my days there," he thought; and he hastened his steps,
for he caught sight of the new sign,--

CELESTIN CREVEL

Successor to Cesar Birotteau

"Am I dazzled, am I going blind? Was that Cesarine?" he cried,
recollecting a blond head he had seen at the window.

He had actually seen his daughter, his wife, and Popinot. The lovers
knew that Birotteau never passed before the windows of his old home, and
they had come to the house to make arrangements for a fete which they
intended to give him. This amazing apparition so astonished Birotteau
that he stood stock-still, unable to move.

"There is Monsieur Birotteau looking at his old house," said Monsieur
Molineux to the owner of a shop opposite to "The Queen of Roses."

"Poor man!" said the perfumer's former neighbor; "he gave a fine
ball--two hundred carriages in the street."

"I was there; and he failed in three months," said Molineux. "I was the
assignee."

Birotteau fled, trembling in every limb, and hastened back to
Pillerault.

Pillerault, who had just been informed of what had happened in the Rue
des Cinq-Diamants, feared that his nephew was scarcely fit to bear the
shock of joy which the sudden knowledge of his restoration would cause
him; for Pillerault was a daily witness of the moral struggles of the
poor man, whose mind stood always face to face with his inflexible
doctrines against bankruptcy, and whose vital forces were used and spent
at ever