come to you too late, I would have proved my friendship by telling you things that would have made you walk upon humanity as upon a carpet.  But when I did talk to you guardedly of Parisian civilization, when I told you in the disguise of fiction some of the actual adventures of my youth, you regarded them as mere romance and would not see their bearing.  When I told you that history of a lawyer at the galleys branded for forgery, who committed the crime to give his wife, adored like yours, an income of thirty thousand francs, and whom his wife denounced that she might be rid of him and free to love another man, you exclaimed, and other fools who were supping with us exclaimed against me.  Well, my dear Paul, you were that lawyer, less the galleys.

Your friends here are not sparing you.  The sister of the two Vandenesses, the Marquise de Listomere and all her set, in which, by the bye, that little Rastignac has enrolled himself,—­the scamp will make his way!—­Madame d’Aiglemont and her salon, the Lenoncourts, the Comtesse Ferraud, Madame d’Espard, the Nucingens, the Spanish ambassador, in short, all the cliques in society are flinging mud upon you.  You are a bad man, a gambler, a dissipated fellow who has squandered his property.  After paying your debts a great many times, your wife, an angel of virtue, has just redeemed your notes for one hundred thousand francs, although her property was separate from yours.  Luckily, you had done the best you could do by disappearing.  If you had stayed here you would have made her bed in the straw; the poor woman would have been the victim of her conjugal devotion!

When a man attains to power, my dear Paul, he has all the virtues of an epitaph; let him fall into poverty, and he has more sins than the Prodigal Son; society at the present moment gives you the vices of a Don Juan.  You gambled at the Bourse, you had licentious tastes which cost you fabulous sums of money to gratify; you paid enormous interests to money-lenders.  The two Vandenesses have told everywhere how Gigonnet gave you for six thousand francs an ivory frigate, and made your valet buy it back for three hundred in order to sell it to you again.  The incident did really happen to Maxime de Trailles about nine years ago; but it fits your present circumstances so well that Maxime has forever lost the command of his frigate.

In short, I can’t tell you one-half that is said; you have supplied a whole encyclopaedia of gossip which the women have an interest in swelling.  Your wife is having an immense success.  Last evening at the opera Madame Firmiani began to repeat to me some of the things that are being said.  “Don’t talk of that,” I replied.  “You know nothing of the real truth, you people.  Paul has robbed the Bank, cheated the Treasury, murdered Ezzelin and three Medoras in the rue Saint-Denis, and I think, between ourselves, that he is a member of the Dix-Mille.  His associate is the famous