The novelty of the position hid its disastrous side; Dinah regarded reciprocated love as the absolution of her sin; she did not yet look beyond the walls of these rooms.  Pamela, whose wits were as sharp as those of a lorette, went straight to Madame Schontz to beg the loan of some plate, telling her what had happened to Lousteau.  After making the child welcome to all she had, Madame Schontz went off to her friend Malaga, that Cardot might be warned of the catastrophe that had befallen his future son-in-law.

The journalist, not in the least uneasy about the crisis as affecting his marriage, was more and more charming to the lady from the provinces.  The dinner was the occasion of the delightful child’s-play of lovers set at liberty, and happy to be free.  When they had had their coffee, and Lousteau was sitting in front of the fire, Dinah on his knee, Pamela ran in with a scared face.

“Here is Monsieur Bixiou!” said she.

“Go into the bedroom,” said the journalist to his mistress; “I will soon get rid of him.  He is one of my most intimate friends, and I shall have to explain to him my new start in life.”

“Oh, ho! dinner for two, and a blue velvet bonnet!” cried Bixiou.  “I am off.—­Ah! that is what comes of marrying—­one must go through some partings.  How rich one feels when one begins to move one’s sticks, heh?”

“Who talks of marrying?” said Lousteau.

“What! are you not going to be married, then?” cried Bixiou.

“No!”

“No?  My word, what next?  Are you making a fool of yourself, if you please?—­What!—­You, who, by the mercy of Heaven, have come across twenty thousand francs a year, and a house, and a wife connected with all the first families of the better middle class—­a wife, in short, out of the Rue des Lombards—­”

“That will do, Bixiou, enough; it is at an end.  Be off!”

“Be off?  I have a friend’s privileges, and I shall take every advantage of them.—­What has come over you?”

“What has ‘come over’ me is my lady from Sancerre.  She is a mother, and we are going to live together happily to the end of our days.—­You would have heard it to-morrow, so you may as well be told it now.”

“Many chimney-pots are falling on my head, as Arnal says.  But if this woman really loves you, my dear fellow, she will go back to the place she came from.  Did any provincial woman ever yet find her sea-legs in Paris?  She will wound all your vanities.  Have you forgotten what a provincial is?  She will bore you as much when she is happy as when she is sad; she will have as great a talent for escaping grace as a Parisian has in inventing it.

“Lousteau, listen to me.  That a passion should lead you to forget to some extent the times in which we live, is conceivable; but I, my dear fellow, have not the mythological bandage over my eyes.—­Well, then consider your position.  For fifteen years you have been tossing in the literary world; you are no longer young, you have padded the hoof till your soles are worn through!—­Yes, my boy, you turn your socks under like a street urchin to hide the holes, so that the legs cover the heels!  In short, the joke is too stale.  Your excuses are more familiar than a patent medicine—­”