“As soon as Rastignac was left alone with Malvina, he spoke in a fatherly, good-humored fashion.  ’Dear child, please to bear in mind that a poor fellow, heavy with sleep, has been drinking tea to keep himself awake till two o’clock in the morning, all for a chance of saying a solemn word of advice to you—­Marry!  Do not be too particular; do not brood over your feelings; never mind the sordid schemes of men that have one foot here and another in the Matifats’ house; do not stop to think at all:  Marry!—­When a girl marries, it means that the man whom she marries undertakes to maintain her in a more or less good position in life, and at any rate her comfort is assured.  I know the world.  Girls, mammas, and grandmammas are all of them hypocrites when they fly off into sentiment over a question of marriage.  Nobody really thinks of anything but a good position.  If a mother marries her daughter well, she says that she has made an excellent bargain.’  Here Rastignac unfolded his theory of marriage, which to his way of thinking is a business arrangement, with a view to making life tolerable; and ended up with, ’I do not ask to know your secret, Malvina; I know it already.  Men talk things over among themselves, just as you women talk after you leave the dinner-table.  This is all I have to say:  Marry.  If you do not, remember that I begged you to marry, here, in this room, this evening!’

“There was a certain ring in Rastignac’s voice which compelled, not attention, but reflection.  There was something startling in his insistence; something that went, as Rastignac meant that it should, to the quick of Malvina’s intelligence.  She thought over the counsel again next day, and vainly asked herself why it had been given.”

Couture broke in.  “In all these tops that you have set spinning, I see nothing at all like the beginnings of Rastignac’s fortune,” said he.  “You apparently take us for Matifats multiplied by half-a-dozen bottles of champagne.”

“We are just coming to it,” returned Bixiou.  “You have followed the course of all the rivulets which make up that forty thousand livres a year which so many people envy.  By this time Rastignac held the threads of all these lives in his hand.”

“Desroches, the Matifats, Beaudenord, the d’Aldriggers, d’Aiglemont?”

“Yes, and a hundred others,” assented Bixiou.

“Oh, come now, how?” cried Finot.  “I know a few things, but I cannot see a glimpse of an answer to this riddle.”

“Blondet has roughly given you the account of Nucingen’s first two suspensions of payment; now for the third, with full details.—­After the peace of 1815, Nucingen grasped an idea which some of us only fully understood later, to wit, that capital is a power only when you are very much richer than other people.  In his own mind, he was jealous of the Rothschilds.  He had five millions of francs, he wanted ten.  He knew a way to make thirty millions with ten, while with five he could only make fifteen.