“I may say to you, like the Regent to Cardinal Dubois, ’That is kicking enough!’” said Lousteau, laughing.

“Oh, venerable young man,” replied Bixiou, “the iron has touched the sore to the quick.  You are worn out, aren’t you?  Well, then; in the heyday of youth, under the pressure of penury, what have you done?  You are not in the front rank, and you have not a thousand francs of your own.  That is the sum-total of the situation.  Can you, in the decline of your powers, support a family by your pen, when your wife, if she is an honest woman, will not have at her command the resources of the woman of the streets, who can extract her thousand-franc note from the depths where milord keeps it safe?  You are rushing into the lowest depths of the social theatre.

“And this is only the financial side.  Now, consider the political position.  We are struggling in an essentially bourgeois age, in which honor, virtue, high-mindedness, talent, learning—­genius, in short, is summed up in paying your way, owing nobody anything, and conducting your affairs with judgment.  Be steady, be respectable, have a wife, and children, pay your rent and taxes, serve in the National Guard, and be on the same pattern as all the men of your company—­then you may indulge in the loftiest pretensions, rise to the Ministry! —­and you have the best chances possible, since you are no Montmorency.  You were preparing to fulfil all the conditions insisted on for turning out a political personage, you are capable of every mean trick that is necessary in office, even of pretending to be commonplace—­you would have acted it to the life.  And just for a woman, who will leave you in the lurch—­the end of every eternal passion—­in three, five, or seven years—­after exhausting your last physical and intellectual powers, you turn your back on the sacred Hearth, on the Rue des Lombards, on a political career, on thirty thousand francs per annum, on respectability and respect!—­Ought that to be the end of a man who has done with illusions?

“If you had kept a pot boiling for some actress who gave you your fun for it—­well; that is what you may call a cabinet matter.  But to live with another man’s wife?  It is a draft at sight on disaster; it is bolting the bitter pills of vice with none of the gilding.”

“That will do.  One word answers it all; I love Madame de la Baudraye, and prefer her to every fortune, to every position the world can offer.—­I may have been carried away by a gust of ambition, but everything must give way to the joy of being a father.”

“Ah, ha! you have a fancy for paternity?  But, wretched man, we are the fathers only of our legitimate children.  What is a brat that does not bear your name?  The last chapter of the romance.—­Your child will be taken from you!  We have seen that story in twenty plays these ten years past.

“Society, my dear boy, will drop upon you sooner or later.  Read Adolphe once more.—­Dear me!  I fancy I can see you when you and she are used to each other;—­I see you dejected, hang-dog, bereft of position and fortune, and fighting like the shareholders of a bogus company when they are tricked by a director!—­Your director is happiness.”