After some target practice at the outer circle of their acquaintances, they turned their ill-natured shafts at their intimate friends.  With a sign I explained my wish to stay and listen as soon as Bixiou took up his parable, as will shortly be seen.  And so we listened to one of those terrific improvisations which won that artist such a name among a certain set of seared and jaded spirits; and often interrupted and resumed though it was, memory serves me as a reporter of it.  The opinions expressed and the form of expression lie alike outside the conditions of literature.  It was, more properly speaking, a medley of sinister revelations that paint our age, to which indeed no other kind of story should be told; and, besides, I throw all the responsibility upon the principal speaker.  The pantomime and the gestures that accompanied Bixiou’s changes of voice, as he acted the parts of the various persons, must have been perfect, judging by the applause and admiring comments that broke from his audience of three.

“Then did Rastignac refuse?” asked Blondet, apparently addressing Finot.

“Point-blank.”

“But did you threaten him with the newspapers?” asked Bixiou.

“He began to laugh,” returned Finot.

“Rastignac is the late lamented de Marsay’s direct heir; he will make his way politically as well as socially,” commented Blondet.

“But how did he make his money?” asked Couture.  “In 1819 both he and the illustrious Bianchon lived in a shabby boarding-house in the Latin Quarter; his people ate roast cockchafers and their own wine so as to send him a hundred francs every month.  His father’s property was not worth a thousand crowns; he had two sisters and a brother on his hands, and now——­”

“Now he has an income of forty thousand livres,” continued Finot; “his sisters had a handsome fortune apiece and married into noble families; he leaves his mother a life interest in the property——­”

“Even in 1827 I have known him without a penny,” said Blondet.

“Oh! in 1827,” said Bixiou.

“Well,” resumed Finot, “yet to-day, as we see, he is in a fair way to be a Minister, a peer of France—­anything that he likes.  He broke decently with Delphine three years ago; he will not marry except on good grounds; and he may marry a girl of noble family.  The chap had the sense to take up with a wealthy woman.”

“My friends, give him the benefit of extenuating circumstances,” urged Blondet.  “When he escaped the clutches of want, he dropped into the claws of a very clever man.”

“You know what Nucingen is,” said Bixiou.  “In the early days, Delphine and Rastignac thought him ‘good-natured’; he seemed to regard a wife as a plaything, an ornament in his house.  And that very fact showed me that the man was square at the base as well as in height,” added Bixiou.  “Nucingen makes no bones about admitting that his wife is his fortune; she is an indispensable chattel, but a wife takes a second place in the high-pressure life of a political leader and great capitalist.  He once said in my hearing that Bonaparte had blundered like a bourgeois in his early relations with Josephine; and that after he had had the spirit to use her as a stepping-stone, he had made himself ridiculous by trying to make a companion of her.”