On April the 3rd, a yellow poster, torn down by the porter after being displayed on the wall, announced the sale of a handsome suite of furniture on the following Saturday, the day fixed for sales under legal authority.  Lousteau was taking a walk, smoking cigars, and seeking ideas—­for, in Paris, ideas are in the air, they smile on you from a street corner, they splash up with a spurt of mud from under the wheels of a cab!  Thus loafing, he had been seeking ideas for articles, and subjects for novels for a month past, and had found nothing but friends who carried him off to dinner or to the play, and who intoxicated his woes, telling him that champagne would inspire him.

“Beware,” said the virulent Bixiou one night, the man who would at the same moment give a comrade a hundred francs and stab him to the heart with a sarcasm; “if you go to sleep drunk every night, one day you will wake up mad.”

On the day before, the Friday, the unhappy wretch, although he was accustomed to poverty, felt like a man condemned to death.  Of old he would have said: 

“Well, the furniture is very old!  I will buy new.”

But he was incapable now of literary legerdemain.  Publishers, undermined by piracy, paid badly; the newspapers made close bargains with hard-driven writers, as the Opera managers did with tenors that sang flat.

He walked on, his eye on the crowd, though seeing nothing, a cigar in his mouth, and his hands in his pockets, every feature of his face twitching, and an affected smile on his lips.  Then he saw Madame de la Baudraye go by in a carriage; she was going to the Boulevard by the Rue de la Chaussee d’Antin to drive in the Bois.

“There is nothing else left!” said he to himself, and he went home to smarten himself up.

That evening, at seven, he arrived in a hackney cab at Madame de la Baudraye’s door, and begged the porter to send a note up to the Countess—­a few lines, as follows: 

“Would Madame la Comtesse do Monsieur Lousteau the favor of receiving him for a moment, and at once?”

This note was sealed with a seal which as lovers they had both used.  Madame de la Baudraye had had the word Parce que engraved on a genuine Oriental carnelian—­a potent word—­a woman’s word—­the word that accounts for everything, even for the Creation.

The Countess had just finished dressing to go to the Opera; Friday was her night in turn for her box.  At the sight of this seal she turned pale.

“I will come,” she said, tucking the note into her dress.

She was firm enough to conceal her agitation, and begged her mother to see the children put to bed.  She then sent for Lousteau, and received him in a boudoir, next to the great drawing-room, with open doors.  She was going to a ball after the Opera, and was wearing a beautiful dress of brocade in stripes alternately plain and flowered with pale blue.  Her gloves, trimmed with tassels, showed off her beautiful white arms.  She was shimmering with lace and all the dainty trifles required by fashion.  Her hair, dressed a la Sevigne, gave her a look of elegance; a necklace of pearls lay on her bosom like bubbles on snow.