These secret schemes brought some changes into the household.  Madame Rabourdin began to walk with a firm step in the path of debt.  She set up a man-servant, and put him in livery of brown cloth with red pipins, she renewed parts of her furniture, hung new papers on the walls, adorned her salon with plants and flowers, always fresh, and crowded it with knick-knacks that were then in vogue; then she, who had always shown scruples as to her personal expenses, did not hesitate to put her dress in keeping with the rank to which she aspired, the profits of which were discounted in several of the shops where she equipped herself for war.  To make her “Wednesdays” fashionable she gave a dinner on Fridays, the guests being expected to pay their return visit and take a cup of tea on the following Wednesday.  She chose her guests cleverly among influential deputies or other persons of note who, sooner or later, might advance her interests.  In short, she gathered an agreeable and befitting circle about her.  People amused themselves at her house; they said so at least, which is quite enough to attract society in Paris.  Rabourdin was so absorbed in completing his great and serious work that he took no notice of the sudden reappearance of luxury in the bosom of his family.

Thus the wife and the husband were besieging the same fortress, working on parallel lines, but without each other’s knowledge.

CHAPTER II

Monsieurdes Lupeaulx

At the ministry to which Rabourdin belonged there flourished, as general-secretary, a certain Monsieur Clement Chardin des Lupeaulx, one of those men whom the tide of political events sends to the surface for a few years, then engulfs on a stormy night, but whom we find again on a distant shore, tossed up like the carcass of a wrecked ship which still seems to have life in her.  We ask ourselves if that derelict could ever have held goodly merchandise or served a high emprize, co-operated in some defence, held up the trappings of a throne, or borne away the corpse of a monarchy.  At this particular time Clement des Lupeaulx (the “Lupeaulx” absorbed the “Chardin”) had reached his culminating period.  In the most illustrious lives as in the most obscure, in animals as in secretary-generals, there is a zenith and there is a nadir, a period when the fur is magnificent, the fortune dazzling.  In the nomenclature which we derive from fabulists, des Lupeaulx belonged to the species Bertrand, and was always in search of Ratons.  As he is one of the principal actors in this drama he deserves a description, all the more precise because the revolution of July has suppressed his office, eminently useful as it was, to a constitutional ministry.