Honore de Balzac: Cousin Betty

1. PART I: THE PRODIGAL FATHER (continued)

"Well, well; but you had Josepha on your hands!" replied Nucingen, "and that accounts for everything. Between ourselves, the Duc d'Herouville has done you a very good turn by removing that leech from sucking your purse dry. 'I have known what that is, and can pity your case,' " he quoted. "Take a friend's advice: Shut up shop, or you will be done for."

This dirty business was carried out in the name of one Vauvinet, a small money-lender; one of those jobbers who stand forward to screen great banking houses, like the little fish that is said to attend the shark. This stock-jobber's apprentice was so anxious to gain the patronage of Monsieur le Baron Hulot, that he promised the great man to negotiate bills of exchange for thirty thousand francs at eighty days, and pledged himself to renew them four times, and never pass them out of his hands.

Fischer's successor was to pay forty thousand francs for the house and the business, with the promise that he should supply forage to a department close to Paris.

This was the desperate maze of affairs into which a man who had hitherto been absolutely honest was led by his passions--one of the best administrative officials under Napoleon--peculation to pay the money-lenders, and borrowing of the money-lenders to gratify his passions and provide for his daughter. All the efforts of this elaborate prodigality were directed at making a display before Madame Marneffe, and to playing Jupiter to this middle-class Danae. A man could not expend more activity, intelligence, and presence of mind in the honest acquisition of a fortune than the Baron displayed in shoving his head into a wasp's nest: He did all the business of his department, he hurried on the upholsterers, he talked to the workmen, he kept a sharp lookout on the smallest details of the house in the Rue Vanneau. Wholly devoted to Madame Marneffe, he nevertheless attended the sittings of the Chambers; he was everywhere at once, and neither his family nor anybody else discovered where his thoughts were.

Adeline, quite amazed to hear that her uncle was rescued, and to see a handsome sum figure in the marriage-contract, was not altogether easy, in spite of her joy at seeing her daughter married under such creditable circumstances. But, on the day before the wedding, fixed by the Baron to coincide with Madame Marneffe's removal to her new apartment, Hector allayed his wife's astonishment by this ministerial communication:--