“But since neither du Tillet nor Desroches married her; just explain Ferdinand’s motive,” said Finot.

“Motive?” repeated Bixiou; “why, this.  General Rule:  A girl that has once given away her slipper, even if she refused it for ten years, is never married by the man who——­”

“Bosh!” interrupted Blondet, “one reason for loving is the fact that one has loved.  His motive?  Here it is.  General Rule:  Do not marry as a sergeant when some day you may be Duke of Dantzig and Marshal of France.  Now, see what a match du Tillet has made since then.  He married one of the Comte de Granville’s daughters, into one of the oldest families in the French magistracy.”

“Desroches’ mother had a friend, a druggist’s wife,” continued Bixiou.  “Said druggist had retired with a fat fortune.  These druggist folk have absurdly crude notions; by way of giving his daughter a good education, he had sent her to a boarding-school!  Well, Matifat meant the girl to marry well, on the strength of two hundred thousand francs, good hard coin with no scent of drugs about it.”

“Florine’s Matifat?” asked Blondet.

“Well, yes.  Lousteau’s Matifat; ours, in fact.  The Matifats, even then lost to us, had gone to live in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, as far as may be from the Rue des Lombards, where their money was made.  For my own part, I had cultivated those Matifats.  While I served my time in the galleys of the law, when I was cooped up for eight hours out of the twenty-four with nincompoops of the first water, I saw queer characters enough to convince myself that all is not dead-level even in obscure places, and that in the flattest inanity you may chance upon an angle.  Yes, dear boy, such and such a philistine is to such another as Raphael is to Natoire.

“Mme. Desroches, the widowed mother, had long ago planned this marriage for her son, in spite of a tremendous obstacle which took the shape of one Cochin, Matifat’s partner’s son, a young clerk in the adult department.  M. and Mme. Matifat were of the opinion that an attorney’s position ‘gave some guarantee for a wife’s happiness,’ to use their own expression; and as for Desroches, he was prepared to fall in with his mother’s views in case he could do no better for himself.  Wherefore, he kept up his acquaintance with the druggists in the Rue du Cherche-Midi.

“To put another kind of happiness before you, you should have a description of these shopkeepers, male and female.  They rejoiced in the possession of a handsome ground floor and a strip of garden; for amusement, they watched a little squirt of water, no bigger than a cornstalk, perpetually rising and falling upon a small round freestone slab in the middle of a basin some six feet across; they would rise early of a morning to see if the plants in the garden had grown in the night; they had nothing to do, they were restless, they dressed for the sake of dressing, bored themselves at the theatre, and were for ever going to and fro between Paris and Luzarches, where they had a country house.  I have dined there.