The letter of credit was drafted in such terms that immediately on his arrival he might draw twenty-five thousand pounds on the firm of Watschildine, the London correspondents of the house of Nucingen.  The London house had been already advised of the draft about to be made upon them; he had written to them himself.  He had instructed an agent (chosen at random) to take his passage in a vessel which was to leave Portsmouth with a wealthy English family on board, who were going to Italy, and the passage money had been paid in the name of the Conte Ferraro.  The smallest details of the scheme had been thought out.  He had arranged matters so as to divert the search that would be made for him into Belgium and Switzerland, while he himself was at sea in the English vessel.  Then, by the time that Nucingen might flatter himself that he was on the track of his late cashier, the said cashier, as the Conte Ferraro, hoped to be safe in Naples.  He had determined to disfigure his face in order to disguise himself the more completely, and by means of an acid to imitate the scars of smallpox.  Yet, in spite of all these precautions, which surely seemed as if they must secure him complete immunity, his conscience tormented him; he was afraid.  The even and peaceful life that he had led for so long had modified the morality of the camp.  His life was stainless as yet; he could not sully it without a pang.  So for the last time he abandoned himself to all the influences of the better self that strenuously resisted.

“Pshaw!” he said at last, at the corner of the Boulevard and the Rue Montmartre, “I will take a cab after the play this evening and go out to Versailles.  A post-chaise will be ready for me at my old quartermaster’s place.  He would keep my secret even if a dozen men were standing ready to shoot him down.  The chances are all in my favor, so far as I see; so I shall take my little Naqui with me, and I will go.”

“You will not go!” exclaimed the Englishman, and the strange tones of his voice drove all the cashier’s blood back to his heart.

Melmoth stepped into a tilbury which was waiting for him, and was whirled away so quickly, that when Castanier looked up he saw his foe some hundred paces away from him, and before it even crossed his mind to cut off the man’s retreat the tilbury was far on its way up the Boulevard Montmartre.

“Well, upon my word, there is something supernatural about this!” said he to himself.  “If I were fool enough to believe in God, I should think that He had set Saint Michael on my tracks.  Suppose that the devil and the police should let me go on as I please, so as to nab me in the nick of time?  Did anyone ever see the like!  But there, this is folly....”

Castanier went along the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, slackening his pace as he neared the Rue Richer.  There, on the second floor of a block of buildings which looked out upon some gardens, lived the unconscious cause of Castanier’s crime—­a young woman known in the quarter as Mme. de la Garde.  A concise history of certain events in the cashier’s past life must be given in order to explain these facts, and to give a complete presentment of the crisis when he yielded to temptation.