"Get on with your story," said Finot, making believe to laugh.

"I take you all to witness that I am not the property of this insolent
fellow, who fancies that my silence is worth no more than five hundred
francs. You will never be a minister if you cannot gauge people's
consciences. There, my good Finot," he added soothingly, "I will get
on with my story without personalities, and we shall be quits."

"Now," said Couture with a smile, "he will begin to prove for our
benefit that Nucingen made Rastignac's fortune."

"You are not so far out as you think," returned Bixiou. "You do not
know what Nucingen is, financially speaking."

"Do you know so much as a word as to his beginnings?" asked Blondet.

"I have only known him in his own house," said Bixiou, "but we may
have seen each other in the street in the old days."

"The prosperity of the firm of Nucingen is one of the most
extraordinary things seen in our days," began Blondet. "In 1804
Nucingen's name was scarcely known. At that time bankers would have
shuddered at the idea of three hundred thousand francs' worth of his
acceptances in the market. The great capitalist felt his inferiority.
How was he to get known? He suspended payment. Good! Every market rang
with a name hitherto only known in Strasbourg and the Quartier
Poissonniere. He issued deposit certificates to his creditors, and
resumed payment; forthwith people grew accustomed to his paper all
over France. Then an unheard-of-thing happened--his paper revived, was
in demand, and rose in value. Nucingen's paper was much inquired for.
The year 1815 arrives, my banker calls in his capital, buys up
Government stock before the battle of Waterloo, suspends payment again
in the thick of the crisis, and meets his engagements with shares in
the Wortschin mines, which he himself issued at twenty per cent more
than he gave for them! Yes, gentlemen!--He took a hundred and fifty
thousand bottles of champagne of Grandet to cover himself (forseeing
the failure of the virtuous parent of the present Comte d'Aubrion),
and as much Bordeaux wine of Duberghe at the same time. Those three
hundred thousand bottles which he took over (and took at thirty sous
apiece, my dear boy) he supplied at the price of six francs per bottle
to the Allies in the Palais Royal during the foreign occupation,
between 1817 and 1819. Nucingen's name and his paper acquired a
European celebrity. The illustrious Baron, so far from being engulfed
like others, rose the higher for calamities. Twice his arrangements
had paid holders of his paper uncommonly well; HE try to swindle them?
Impossible. He is supposed to be as honest a man as you will find.
When he suspends payment a third time, his paper will circulate in
Asia, Mexico, and Australia, among the aborigines. No one but Ouvrard
saw through this Alsacien banker, the son of some Jew or other
converted by ambition; Ouvrard said, 'When Nucingen lets gold go, you
may be sure that it is to catch diamonds.' "

"His crony, du Tillet, is just such another," said Finot. "And, mind
you, that of birth du Tillet has just precisely as much as is
necessary to exist; the chap had not a farthing in 1814, and you see
what he is now; and he has done something that none of us has managed
to do (I am not speaking of you, Couture), he has had friends instead
of enemies. In fact, he has kept his past life so quiet, that unless
you rake the sewers you are not likely to find out that he was an
assistant in a perfumer's shop in the Rue Saint Honore, no further
back than 1814."

"Tut, tut, tut!" said Bixiou, "do not think of comparing Nucingen with
a little dabbler like du Tillet, a jackal that gets on in life through
his sense of smell. He scents a carcass by instinct, and comes in time
to get the best bone. Besides, just look at the two men. The one has a
sharp-pointed face like a cat, he is thin and lanky; the other is
cubical, fat, heavy as a sack, imperturbable as a diplomatist.
Nucingen has a thick, heavy hand, and lynx eyes that never light up;
his depths are not in front, but behind; he is inscrutable, you never
see what he is making for. Whereas du Tillet's cunning, as Napoleon
said to somebody (I have forgotten the name), is like cotton spun too
fine, it breaks."

"I do not myself see that Nucingen has any advantage over du Tillet,"
said Blondet, "unless it is that he has the sense to see that a
capitalist ought not to rise higher than a baron's rank, while du
Tillet has a mind to be an Italian count."

"Blondet--one word, my boy," put in Couture. "In the first place,
Nucingen dared to say that honesty is simply a question of
appearances; and secondly, to know him well you must be in business
yourself. With him banking is but a single department, and a very
small one; he holds Government contracts for wines, wools, indigoes--
anything, in short, on which any profit can be made. He has an all-
round genius. The elephant of finance would contract to deliver votes
on a division, or the Greeks to the Turks. For him business means the
sum-total of varieties; as Cousin would say, the unity of specialties.
Looked at in this way, banking becomes a kind of statecraft in itself,
requiring a powerful head; and a man thoroughly tempered is drawn on
to set himself above the laws of a morality that cramps him."

"Right, my son," said Blondet; "but we, and we alone, can comprehend
that this means bringing war into the financial world. A banker is a
conquering general making sacrifices on a tremendous scale to gain
ends that no one perceives; his soldiers are private people's
interests. He has stratagems to plan out, partisans to bring into the
field, ambushes to set, towns to take. Most men of this stamp are so
close upon the borders of politics, that in the end they are drawn
into public life, and thereby lose their fortunes. The firm of Necker,
for instance, was ruined in this way; the famous Samuel Bernard was
all but ruined. Some great capitalist in every age makes a colossal
fortune, and leaves behind him neither fortune nor a family; there was
the firm of Paris Brothers, for instance, that helped to pull down
Law; there was Law himself (beside whom other promoters of companies
are but pigmies); there was Bouret and Beaujon--none of them left any
representative. Finance, like Time, devours its own children. If the
banker is to perpetuate himself, he must found a noble house, a
dynasty; like the Fuggers of Antwerp, that lent money to Charles V.
and were created Princes of Babenhausen, a family that exists at this
day--in the Almanach de Gotha. The instinct of self-preservation,
working it may be unconsciously, leads the banker to seek a title.
Jacques Coeur was the founder of the great noble house of Noirmoutier,
extinct in the reign of Louis XIII. What power that man had! He was
ruined for making a legitimate king; and he died, prince of an island
in the Archipelago, where he built a magnificent cathedral."

"Oh! you are giving us an historical lecture, we are wandering away
from the present, the crown has no right of conferring nobility, and
barons and counts are made with closed doors; more is the pity!" said
Finot.

"You regret the times of the savonnette a vilain, when you could buy
an office that ennobled?" asked Bixiou. "You are right. Je reviens a
nos moutons.--Do you know Beaudenord? No? no? no? Ah, well! See how
all things pass away! Poor fellow, ten years ago he was the flower of
dandyism; and now, so thoroughly absorbed that you no more know him
than Finot just now knew the origin of the expression 'coup de
Jarnac'--I repeat that simply for the sake of illustration, and not to
tease you, Finot. Well, it is a fact, he belonged to the Faubourg
Saint-Germain.

"Beaudenord is the first pigeon that I will bring on the scene. And,
in the first place, his name was Godefroid de Beaudenord; neither
Finot, nor Blondet, nor Couture, nor I am likely to undervalue such an
advantage as that! After a ball, when a score of pretty women stand
behooded waiting for their carriages, with their husbands and adorers
at their sides, Beaudenord could hear his people called without a pang
of mortification. In the second place, he rejoiced in the full
complement of limbs; he was whole and sound, had no mote in his eyes,
no false hair, no artificial calves; he was neither knock-kneed nor
bandy-legged, his dorsal column was straight, his waist slender, his
hands white and shapely. His hair was black; he was of a complexion
neither too pink, like a grocer's assistant, nor yet too brown, like a
Calabrese. Finally, and this is an essential point, Beaudenord was not
too handsome, like some of our friends that look rather too much of
professional beauties to be anything else; but no more of that; we
have said it, it is shocking! Well, he was a crack shot, and sat a
horse to admiration; he had fought a duel for a trifle, and had not
killed his man.

"If you wish to know in what pure, complete, and unadulterated
happiness consists in this Nineteenth Century in Paris--the happiness,
that is to say, of a young man of twenty-six--do you realize that you
must enter into the infinitely small details of existence?
Beaudenord's bootmaker had precisely hit off his style of foot; he was
well shod; his tailor loved to clothe him. Godefroid neither rolled
his r's, nor lapsed into Normanisms nor Gascon; he spoke pure and
correct French, and tied his cravat correctly (like Finot). He had
neither father nor mother--such luck had he!--and his guardian was the
Marquis d'Aiglemont, his cousin by marriage. He could go among city
people as he chose, and the Faubourg Saint-Germain could make no
objection; for, fortunately, a young bachelor is allowed to make his
own pleasure his sole rule of life, he is at liberty to betake himself
wherever amusement is to be found, and to shun the gloomy places where
cares flourish and multiply. Finally, he had been vaccinated (you know
what I mean, Blondet).

"And yet, in spite of all these virtues," continued Bixiou, "he might
very well have been a very unhappy young man. Eh! eh! that word
happiness, unhappily, seems to us to mean something absolute, a
delusion which sets so many wiseacres inquiring what happiness is. A
very clever woman said that 'Happiness was where you chose to put
it.' "

"She formulated a dismal truth," said Blondet.

"And a moral," added Finot.

"Double distilled," said Blondet. "Happiness, like Good, like Evil, is
relative. Wherefore La Fontaine used to hope that in the course of
time the damned would feel as much at home in hell as a fish in
water."

"La Fontaine's sayings are known in Philistia!" put in Bixiou.

"Happiness at six-and-twenty in Paris is not the happiness of six-and-
twenty at--say Blois," continued Blondet, taking no notice of the
interruption. "And those that proceed from this text to rail at the
instability of opinion are either knaves or fools for their pains.
Modern medicine, which passed (it is its fairest title to glory) from
a hypothetical to a positive science, through the influence of the
great analytical school of Paris, has proved beyond a doubt that a man
is periodically renewed throughout----"

"New haft, new blade, like Jeannot's knife, and yet you think that he
is still the same man," broke in Bixiou. "So there are several
lozenges in the harlequin's coat that we call happiness; and--well,
there was neither hole nor stain in this Godefroid's costume. A young