In the month of March, Madame Piedefer’s friends the priests and Monsieur de Clagny made a fine stroke by getting Madame de la Baudraye appointed receiver of subscriptions for the great charitable work founded by Madame de Carcado.  Then she was commissioned to collect from the Royal Family their donations for the benefit of the sufferers from the earthquake at Guadeloupe.  The Marquise d’Espard, to whom Monsieur de Canalis read the list of ladies thus appointed, one evening at the Opera, said, on hearing that of the Countess: 

“I have lived a long time in the world, and I can remember nothing finer than the manoeuvres undertaken for the rehabilitation of Madame de la Baudraye.”

In the early spring, which, by some whim of our planets, smiled on Paris in the first week of March in 1843, making the Champs-Elysees green and leafy before Longchamp, Fanny Beaupre’s attache had seen Madame de la Baudraye several times without being seen by her.  More than once he was stung to the heart by one of those promptings of jealousy and envy familiar to those who are born and bred provincials, when he beheld his former mistress comfortably ensconced in a handsome carriage, well dressed, with dreamy eyes, and his two little boys, one at each window.  He accused himself with all the more virulence because he was waging war with the sharpest poverty of all—­poverty unconfessed.  Like all essentially light and frivolous natures, he cherished the singular point of honor which consists in never derogating in the eyes of one’s own little public, which makes men on the Bourse commit crimes to escape expulsion from the temple of the goddess Per-cent, and has given some criminals courage enough to perform acts of virtue.

Lousteau dined and breakfasted and smoked as if he were a rich man.  Not for an inheritance would he have bought any but the dearest cigars, for himself as well as for the playwright or author with whom he went into the shop.  The journalist took his walks abroad in patent leather boots; but he was constantly afraid of an execution on goods which, to use the bailiff’s slang, had already received the last sacrament.  Fanny Beaupre had nothing left to pawn, and her salary was pledged to pay her debts.  After exhausting every possible advance of pay from newspapers, magazines, and publishers, Etienne knew not of what ink he could churn gold.  Gambling-houses, so ruthlessly suppressed, could no longer, as of old, cash I O U’s drawn over the green table by beggary in despair.  In short, the journalist was reduced to such extremity that he had just borrowed a hundred francs of the poorest of his friends, Bixiou, from whom he had never yet asked for a franc.  What distressed Lousteau was not the fact of owing five thousand francs, but seeing himself bereft of his elegance, and of the furniture purchased at the cost of so many privations, and added to by Madame de la Baudraye.