is under obligations to Mariette, and wants to pay them off.  After squandering the fortunes of two Englishmen, a Russian, and an Italian prince, Mademoiselle Esther is now in poverty; give her ten thousand francs, that will satisfy her.  She has just remarked, laughing, that she has never yet fricasseed a bourgeois, and it will get her hand in.  Esther is well known to Finot, Bixiou, and des Lupeaulx, in fact to all our set.  Ah! if there were any real fortunes left in France, she would be the greatest courtesan of modern times.

All the editorial staff, Nathan, Finot, Bixiou, etc., are now joking the aforesaid Esther in a magnificent appartement just arranged for Florine by old Lord Dudley (the real father of de Marsay); the lively actress captured him by the dress of her new role.  Tullia is with the Duc de Rhetore, Mariette is still with the Duc de Maufrigneuse; between them, they will get your sentence remitted in time for the King’s fete.  Bury your uncle under the roses before the Saint-Louis, bring away the property, and spend a little of it with Esther and your old friends, who sign this epistle in a body, to remind you of them.

  Nathan, Florine, Bixiou, Finot, Mariette,

  Florentine, Giroudeau, Tullia

The letter shook in the trembling hands of Madame Rouget, and betrayed the terror of her mind and body.  The aunt dared not look at the nephew, who fixed his eyes upon her with terrible meaning.

“I trust you,” he said, “as you see; but I expect some return.  I have made you my aunt intending to marry you some day.  You are worth more to me than Esther in managing my uncle.  In a year from now, we must be in Paris; the only place where beauty really lives.  You will amuse yourself much better there than here; it is a perpetual carnival.  I shall return to the army, and become a general, and you will be a great lady.  There’s our future; now work for it.  But I must have a pledge to bind this agreement.  You are to give me, within a month from now, a power of attorney from my uncle, which you must obtain under pretence of relieving him of the fatigues of business.  Also, a month later, I must have a special power of attorney to transfer the income in the Funds.  When that stands in my name, you and I have an equal interest in marrying each other.  There it all is, my beautiful aunt, as plain as day.  Between you and me there must be no ambiguity.  I can marry my aunt at the end of a year’s widowhood; but I could not marry a disgraced girl.”

He left the room without waiting for an answer.  When Vedie came in, fifteen minutes later, to clear the table, she found her mistress pale and moist with perspiration, in spite of the season.  Flore felt like a woman who had fallen to the bottom of a precipice; the future loomed black before her; and on its blackness, in the far distance, were shapes of monstrous things, indistinctly perceptible, and terrifying.  She