“A man of the town like you would never pass muster with that woman, who, in her well-meaning way, will spy out your bachelor life and know every fact of the past.  However, Cardot says he means to exert his paternal authority.  The poor man will be obliged to do the civil to his wife for some days; a woman made of wood, my dear fellow; Malaga, who has seen her, calls her a penitential scrubber.  Cardot is a man of forty; he will be mayor of his district, and perhaps be elected deputy.  He is prepared to give in lieu of the hundred thousand francs a nice little house in the Rue Saint-Lazare, with a forecourt and a garden, which cost him no more than sixty thousand at the time of the July overthrow; he would sell, and that would be an opportunity for you to go and come at the house, to see the daughter, and be civil to the mother.—­And it would give you a look of property in Madame Cardot’s eyes.  You would be housed like a prince in that little mansion.  Then, by Camusot’s interest, you may get an appointment as librarian to some public office where there is no library.—­Well, and then if you invest your money in backing up a newspaper, you will get ten thousand francs a year on it, you can earn six, your librarianship will bring you in four.—­Can you do better for yourself?

“If you were to marry a lamb without spot, it might be a light woman by the end of two years.  What is the damage?—­an anticipated dividend!  It is quite the fashion.

“Take my word for it, you can do no better than come to dine with Malaga to-morrow.  You will meet your father-in-law; he will know the secret has been let out—­by Malaga, with whom he cannot be angry—­and then you are master of the situation.  As to your wife!—­Why her misconduct leaves you as free as a bachelor——­”

“Your language is as blunt as a cannon ball.”

“I love you for your own sake, that is all—­and I can reason.  Well! why do you stand there like a wax image of Abd-el-Kader?  There is nothing to meditate over.  Marriage is heads or tails—­well, you have tossed heads up.”

“You shall have my reply to-morrow,” said Lousteau.

“I would sooner have it at once; Malaga will write you up to-night.”

“Well, then, yes.”

Lousteau spent the evening in writing a long letter to the Marquise, giving her the reasons which compelled him to marry; his constant poverty, the torpor of his imagination, his white hairs, his moral and physical exhaustion—­in short, four pages of arguments.—­“As to Dinah, I will send her a circular announcing the marriage,” said he to himself.  “As Bixiou says, I have not my match for knowing how to dock the tail of a passion.”

Lousteau, who at first had been on some ceremony with himself, by next day had come to the point of dreading lest the marriage should not come off.  He was pressingly civil to the notary.