“You know that?” said Vaudrey, turning pale.

“Ah!  I know many others in like condition!  Come, no false modesty!  It is a matter of business only!  I tell you again, I have many other cases.  All this is in order to have the pleasure of offering you certificates for attendance fees.  I will open a credit for you of two hundred thousand francs, if you wish.  We will arrange matters afterwards.”

“I will leave you these declarations of faith!” added Molina, showing the prospectus of the gas undertaking.  “Fear nothing!  It is not more untruthful than the others!  It is unnecessary to show me out. A la revista!”

He disappeared abruptly, Vaudrey hearing the floor of the hall creak under this man’s hippopotamus feet, and the unhappy Sulpice who had spun so many, such glorious and grand dreams, dreams of liberty, freedom and virtue, civic regeneration, reconstructed national morals and character, the sacredness of the hearth and the education of the conscience; this Vaudrey, bruised by life, overthrown by his vices, was there under the soft light of his lamp, looking with staring eye, as a being who wishes to die contemplates the edge of an abyss, looking at that printed paper soliciting subscriptions, beating the big drum of the promoter in order to entrap the vast and ever-credulous horde.

His name!  To put his name there!  The name of Vaudrey that he had dreamed of reading at the foot of so many noble, eternal and reforming laws, to inscribe it upon that paper beneath so many cunning names, jugglers, habitual drainers of the public cash-box.  To fall to that!  To do that!

To lend himself?

To sell himself!

And why not sell himself?  Who would discharge this bill of exchange?  The Gochard paper!  The debt of the past!  The price of the nights spent with Marianne!  The hundred thousand francs for that girl’s kisses!

Sulpice felt in the weakness increased by a growing fever, that his self-possession was leaving him.  All his ideas clashed confusedly.  Amid the chaos, only one clear idea remained; a hundred and sixty thousand francs had to be found.  Where were they to be found?  Yes, where?  Through Molina, who offered him two hundred thousand!  This open credit seemed to him like an opened-up placer in which he had only to dig with his nails.  The cunning and thick voice of the Hebrew banker echoed in Sulpice’s ears:  “They all do it!” It was not so difficult to give his name, or to hire it, as Salomon said.  Who the devil would notice it at a time when indifference passes over scandals as the sea covers the putrid substances on the shore and washes them with its very scum?

“They all do it!”