“All material well-being is based upon arithmetic.  You to whom Paris is known down to its very excrescences, will see that Beaudenord must have acquired about seventeen thousand livres per annum; for he paid some seventeen francs of taxes and spent a thousand crowns on his own whims.  Well, dear boys, when Godefroid came of age, the Marquis d’Aiglemont submitted to him such an account of his trust as none of us would be likely to give a nephew; Godefroid’s name was inscribed as the owner of eighteen thousand livres of rentes, a remnant of his father’s wealth spared by the harrow of the great reduction under the Republic and the hailstorms of Imperial arrears.  D’Aiglemont, that upright guardian, also put his ward in possession of some thirty thousand francs of savings invested with the firm of Nucingen; saying with all the charm of a grand seigneur and the indulgence of a soldier of the Empire, that he had contrived to put it aside for his ward’s young man’s follies.  ‘If you will take my advice, Godefroid,’ added he, ’instead of squandering the money like a fool, as so many young men do, let it go in follies that will be useful to you afterwards.  Take an attache’s post at Turin, and then go to Naples, and from Naples to London, and you will be amused and learn something for your money.  Afterwards, if you think of a career, the time and the money will not have been thrown away.’  The late lamented d’Aiglemont had more sense than people credited him with, which is more than can be said of some of us.”

“A young fellow that starts with an assured income of eighteen thousand livres at one-and-twenty is lost,” said Couture.

“Unless he is miserly, or very much above the ordinary level,” added Blondet.

“Well, Godefroid sojourned in the four capitals of Italy,” continued Bixiou.  “He lived in England and Germany, he spent some little time at St. Petersburg, he ran over Holland but he parted company with the aforesaid thirty thousand francs by living as if he had thirty thousand a year.  Everywhere he found the same supreme de volaille, the same aspics, and French wines; he heard French spoken wherever he went —­in short, he never got away from Paris.  He ought, of course, to have tried to deprave his disposition, to fence himself in triple brass, to get rid of his illusions, to learn to hear anything said without a blush, and to master the inmost secrets of the Powers.—­Pooh! with a good deal of trouble he equipped himself with four languages—­that is to say, he laid in a stock of four words for one idea.  Then he came back, and certain tedious dowagers, styled ‘conquests’ abroad, were left disconsolate.  Godefroid came back, shy, scarcely formed, a good fellow with a confiding disposition, incapable of saying ill of any one who honored him with an admittance to his house, too staunch to be a diplomatist, altogether he was what we call a thoroughly good fellow.”

“To cut it short, a brat with eighteen thousand livres per annum to drop over the first investment that turns up,” said Couture.