None but Parisian women are clever enough always to give a new charm to the moon, to romanticize the stars, to roll in the same sack of charcoal and emerge each time whiter than ever.  This is the highest refinement of intellectual and Parisian civilization.  Women beyond the Rhine or the English Channel believe nonsense of this sort when they utter it; while your Parisienne makes her lover believe that she is an angel, the better to add to his bliss by flattering his vanity on both sides—­temporal and spiritual.  Certain persons, detractors of the Duchess, maintain that she was the first dupe of her own white magic.  A wicked slander.  The Duchess believed in nothing but herself.

By the end of the year 1823 the Kellers had supplied Victurnien with two hundred thousand francs, and neither Chesnel nor Mlle. Armande knew anything about it.  He had had, besides, two thousand crowns from Chesnel at one time and another, the better to hide the sources on which he was drawing.  He wrote lying letters to his poor father and aunt, who lived on, happy and deceived, like most happy people under the sun.  The insidious current of life in Paris was bringing a dreadful catastrophe upon the great and noble house; and only one person was in the secret of it.  This was du Croisier.  He rubbed his hands gleefully as he went past in the dark and looked in at the Antiquities.  He had good hope of attaining his ends; and his ends were not, as heretofore, the simple ruin of the d’Esgrignons, but the dishonor of their house.  He felt instinctively at such times that his revenge was at hand; he scented it in the wind!  He had been sure of it indeed from the day when he discovered that the young Count’s burden of debt was growing too heavy for the boy to bear.

Du Croisier’s first step was to rid himself of his most hated enemy, the venerable Chesnel.  The good old man lived in the Rue du Bercail, in a house with a steep-pitched roof.  There was a little paved courtyard in front, where the rose-bushes grew and clambered up to the windows of the upper story.  Behind lay a little country garden, with its box-edged borders, shut in by damp, gloomy-looking walls.  The prim, gray-painted street door, with its wicket opening and bell attached, announced quite as plainly as the official scutcheon that “a notary lives here.”

It was half-past five o’clock in the afternoon, at which hour the old man usually sat digesting his dinner.  He had drawn his black leather-covered armchair before the fire, and put on his armor, a painted pasteboard contrivance shaped like a top boot, which protected his stockinged legs from the heat of the fire; for it was one of the good man’s habits to sit for a while after dinner with his feet on the dogs and to stir up the glowing coals.  He always ate too much; he was fond of good living.  Alas! if it had not been for that little failing, would he not have been more perfect than it is permitted to mortal man to be?  Chesnel had finished his