“Yes; but I shall not give for the last year’s rent more than forty-three thousand francs; your note will pay the remainder.  I have seen the house, and examined it.  It suits me very well.”

“One last condition,” said Theodose; “you’ll help me against Dutocq?”

“No,” said Cerizet, “you’ll cook him brown yourself; he doesn’t need any basting from me; he’ll give out his gravy fast enough.  But you ought to be reasonable.  The poor fellow can’t pay off the last fifteen thousand francs due on his practice, and you should reflect that fifteen thousand francs would certainly buy back your notes.”

“Well; give me two weeks to get your lease—­”

“No, not a day later than Monday next!  Tuesday your notes will be in Louchard’s hands; unless you pay them Monday, or Thuillier signs the lease.”

“Well, Monday, so be it!” said Theodose; “are we friends?”

“We shall be Monday,” responded Cerizet.

“Well, then, Monday you’ll pay for my dinner,” said Theodose, laughing.

“Yes, at the Rocher de Cancale, if I have the lease.  Dutocq shall be there—­we’ll all be there—­ah! it is long since I’ve had a good laugh.”

Theodose and Cerizet shook hands, saying, reciprocally:—­

“We’ll meet soon.”

Cerizet had not calmed down so suddenly without reasons.  In the first place, as Desroches once said, “Bile does not facilitate business,” and the usurer had too well seen the justice of that remark not to coolly resolve to get something out of his position, and to squeeze the jugular vein of the crafty Provencal until he strangled him.

“It is a fair revenge,” Desroches said to him; “mind you extract its quintessence.  You hold that fellow.”

For ten years past Cerizet had seen men growing rich by practising the trade of principal tenant.  The principal tenant is, in Paris, to the owners of houses what farmers are to country landlords.  All Paris has seen one of its great tailors, building at his own cost, on the famous site of Frascati, one of the most sumptuous of houses, and paying, as principal tenant, fifty thousand francs a year for the ground rent of the house, which, at the end of nineteen years’ lease, was to become the property of the owner of the land.  In spite of the costs of construction, which were something like seven hundred thousand francs, the profits of those nineteen years proved, in the end, very large.

Cerizet, always on the watch for business, had examined the chances for gain offered by the situation of the house which Thuillier had stolen,—­as he said to Desroches,—­and he had seen the possibility of letting it for sixty thousand at the end of six years.  There were four shops, two on each side, for it stood on a boulevard corner.  Cerizet expected, therefore, to get clear ten thousand a year for a dozen years, allowing for eventualities and sundries attendant on renewal of leases.  He therefore proposed to himself to sell his money-lending