The cause of this phenomenon was as follows:  Lousteau lived in the Rue des Martyrs in pretty ground-floor rooms with a garden, and splendidly furnished.  When he settled there in 1833 he had come to an agreement with an upholsterer that kept his pocket money low for a long time.  These rooms were let for twelve hundred francs.  The months of January, April, July, and October were, as he phrased it, his indigent months.  The rent and the porter’s account cleaned him out.  Lousteau took no fewer hackney cabs, spend a hundred francs in breakfasts all the same, smoked thirty francs’ worth of cigars, and could never refuse the mistress of a day a dinner or a new dress.  He thus dipped so deeply into the fluctuating earnings of the following months, that he could no more find a hundred francs on his chimney-piece now, when he was making seven or eight hundred francs a month, than he could in 1822, when he was hardly getting two hundred.

Tired, sometimes, by the incessant vicissitudes of a literary life, and as much bored by amusement as a courtesan, Lousteau would get out of the tideway and sit on the bank, and say to one and another of his intimate allies—­Nathan or Bixiou, as they sat smoking in his scrap of garden, looking out on an evergreen lawn as big as a dinner-table: 

“What will be the end of us?  White hairs are giving us respectful hints!”

“Lord! we shall marry when we choose to give as much thought to the matter as we give to a drama or a novel,” said Nathan.

“And Florine?” retorted Bixiou.

“Oh, we all have a Florine,” said Etienne, flinging away the end of his cigar and thinking of Madame Schontz.

Madame Schontz was a pretty enough woman to put a very high price on the interest on her beauty, while reserving absolute ownership for Lousteau, the man of her heart.  Like all those women who get the name in Paris of Lorettes, from the Church of Notre Dame de Lorette, round about which they dwell, she lived in the Rue Flechier, a stone’s throw from Lousteau.  This lady took a pride and delight in teasing her friends by boasting of having a Wit for her lover.

These details of Lousteau’s life and fortune are indispensable, for this penury and this bohemian existence of a man to whom Parisian luxury had become a necessity, were fated to have a cruel influence on Dinah’s life.  Those to whom the bohemia of Paris is familiar will now understand how it was that, by the end of a fortnight, the journalist, up to his ears in the literary environment, could laugh about his Baroness with his friends and even with Madame Schontz.  To such readers as regard such things as utterly mean, it is almost useless to make excuses which they will not accept.

“What did you do at Sancerre?” asked Bixiou the first time he met Lousteau.

“I did good service to three worthy provincials—­a Receiver-General of Taxes, a little cousin of his, and a Public Prosecutor, who for ten years had been dancing round and round one of the hundred ’Tenth Muses’ who adorn the Departments,” said he.  “But they had no more dared to touch her than we touch a decorated cream at dessert till some strong-minded person has made a hole in it.”