“Good heavens, no!  Dutocq can have the promise of a good place as soon as you are named head of the division.”

“Ah!  I see what you are about, dear child,” said Rabourdin; “but the game you are playing is just as dishonorable as the real thing that is going on around us.  A lie is a lie, and an honest woman—­”

“Let me use the weapons employed against us.”

“Celestine, the more that man des Lupeaulx feels he is foolishly caught in a trap, the more bitter he will be against me.”

“What if I get him dismissed altogether?”

Rabourdin looked at his wife in amazement.

“I am thinking only of your advancement; it was high time, my poor husband,” continued Celestine.  “But you are mistaking the dog for the game,” she added, after a pause.  “In a few days des Lupeaulx will have accomplished all that I want of him.  While you are trying to speak to the minister, and before you can even see him on business, I shall have seen him and spoken with him.  You are worn out in trying to bring that plan of your brain to birth,—­a plan which you have been hiding from me; but you will find that in three months your wife has accomplished more than you have done in six years.  Come, tell me this fine scheme of yours.”

Rabourdin, continuing to shave, cautioned his wife not to say a word about his work, and after assuring her that to confide a single idea to des Lupeaulx would be to put the cat near the milk-jug, he began an explanation of his labors.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before, Rabourdin?” said Celestine, cutting her husband short at his fifth sentence.  “You might have saved yourself a world of trouble.  I can understand that a man should be blinded by an idea for a moment, but to nurse it up for six or seven years, that’s a thing I cannot comprehend!  You want to reduce the budget,—­a vulgar and commonplace idea!  The budget ought, on the contrary, to reach two hundred millions.  Then, indeed, France would be great.  If you want a new system let it be one of loans, as Monsieur de Nucingen keeps saying.  The poorest of all treasuries is the one with a surplus that it never uses; the mission of a minister of finance is to fling gold out of the windows.  It will come back to him through the cellars; and you, you want to hoard it!  The thing to do is to increase the offices and all government employments, instead of reducing them!  So far from lessening the public debt, you ought to increase the creditors.  If the Bourbons want to reign in peace, let them seek creditors in the towns and villages, and place their loans there; above all, they ought not to let foreigners draw interest away from France; some day an alien nation might ask us for the capital.  Whereas if capital and interest are held only in France, neither France nor credit can perish.  That’s what saved England.  Your plan is the tradesman’s plan.  An ambitious public man should produce some bold scheme,—­he should make himself another Law, without Law’s fatal ill-luck; he ought to exhibit the power of credit, and show that we should reduce, not principal, but interest, as they do in England.”