“Des Lupeaulx.”

The three young men looked at each other with one and the same thought and suspicion, but they did not utter it.

“Explain all your resources; show us your hand,” said de Marsay.

When Savinien had told of his mother and her old-fashioned ways, and the little house with three windows in the Rue des Bourgeois, without other grounds than a court for the well and a shed for the wood; when he had valued the house, built of sandstone and pointed in reddish cement, and put a price on the farm at Bordieres, the three dandies looked at each other, and all three said with a solemn air the word of the abbe in Alfred de Musset’s “Marrons du feu” (which had then just appeared),—­“Sad!”

“Your mother will pay if you write a clever letter,” said Rastignac.

“Yes, but afterwards?” cried de Marsay.

“If you had merely been put in the fiacre,” said Lucien, “the government would find you a place in diplomacy, but Saint-Pelagie isn’t the antechamber of an embassy.”

“You are not strong enough for Parisian life,” said Rastignac.

“Let us consider the matter,” said de Marsay, looking Savinien over as a jockey examines a horse.  “You have fine blue eyes, well opened, a white forehead well shaped, magnificent black hair, a little moustache which suits those pale cheeks, and a slim figure; you’ve a foot that tells race, shoulders and chest not quite those of a porter, but solid.  You are what I call an elegant male brunette.  Your face is of the style Louis XII., hardly any color, well-formed nose; and you have the thing that pleases women, a something, I don’t know what it is, which men take no account of themselves; it is in the air, the manner, the tone of the voice, the dart of the eye, the gesture,—­in short, in a number of little things which women see and to which they attach a meaning which escapes us.  You don’t know your merits, my dear fellow.  Take a certain tone and style and in six months you’ll captivate an English-woman with a hundred thousand pounds; but you must call yourself viscount, a title which belongs to you.  My charming step-mother, Lady Dudley, who has not her equal for matching two hearts, will find you some such woman in the fens of Great Britain.  What you must now do is to get the payment of your debts postponed for ninety days.  Why didn’t you tell us about them?  The money-lenders at Baden would have spared you—­served you perhaps; but now, after you have once been in prison, they’ll despise you.  A money-lender is, like society, like the masses, down on his knees before the man who is strong enough to trick him, and pitiless to the lambs.  To the eyes of some persons Sainte-Pelagie is a she-devil who burns the souls of young men.  Do you want my candid advice?  I shall tell you as I told that little d’Esgrignon:  ’Arrange to pay your debts leisurely; keep enough to live on for three years, and marry some girl in the provinces who can bring you an income of thirty thousand francs.’  In the course of three years you can surely find some virtuous heiress who is willing to call herself Madame la Vicomtesse de Portenduere.  Such is virtue,—­let’s drink to it.  I give you a toast:  ’The girl with money!”