Pierre, rendered anxious on hearing that Serge had joined Herzog in his dangerous financial speculations, had left his mines and had just arrived.  The letters which Micheline addressed to the friend of her youth, her enforced confidant in trouble, were calm and resigned.  Full of pride, she had carefully hidden from Pierre the cause of her troubles.  He was the last person by whom she would like to be pitied, and her letters had represented Serge as repentant and full of good feeling.  Marechal, for similar reasons, had kept his friend in the dark.  He feared Pierre’s interference, and he wished to spare Madame Desvarennes the grief of seeing her adopted son quarreling with her son-in-law.

But the placards announcing the establishment of the Universal Credit Company made their way into the provinces, and one morning Pierre found some stuck on the walls of his establishment.  Seeing the name of Panine, and not that of Cayrol, Pierre shuddered.  The unpleasant ideas which he experienced formerly when Herzog was introduced to the Desvarennes recurred to his mind.  He wrote to the mistress to ask what was going on, and not receiving an answer, he started off without hesitation for Paris.

He found Madame Desvarennes in a terrible state of excitement.  The shares had just fallen a hundred and twenty francs.  A panic had ensued.  The affair was considered as absolutely lost, and the shareholders were aggravating matters by wanting to sell out at once.

Savinien was just coming away from the mistress’s room.  He wanted to see the downfall of the Prince, whom he had always hated, looking upon him as a usurper of his own rights upon the fortune of the Desvarennes.  He began lamenting to his aunt, when she turned upon him with unusual harshness, and he felt bound as he said, laughing, to leave the “funereal mansion.”

Cayrol, as much interested in the affairs of the Prince as if they were his own, went backward and forward between the Rue Saint-Dominique and the Rue Taitbout, pale and troubled, but without losing his head.  He had already saved the European Credit Company by separating it six weeks before from the Universal Credit Company, notwithstanding Madame Desvarennes’s supplications to keep them together, in the hope that the one would save the other.  But Cayrol, practical, clear, and implacable, had refused, for the first time, to obey Madame Desvarennes.  He acted with the resolution of a captain of a vessel, who throws overboard a portion of the cargo to save the ship, the crew, and the rest of the merchandise.  He did well, and the European Credit was safe.  The shares had fallen a little, but a favorable reaction was already showing itself.  The name of Cayrol, and his presence at the head of affairs, had reassured the public, and the shareholders gathered round him, passing a vote of confidence.

The banker, devoted to his task, next sought to save Panine, who was at that very moment robbing him of his honor and happiness in the house of the Avenue Maillot.