At this point her tears flowed so fast, Adeline was sobbing so passionately, that Crevel’s gloves were wet.  The words, “I need two hundred thousand francs,” were scarcely articulate in the torrent of weeping, as stones, however large, are invisible in Alpine cataracts swollen by the melting of the snows.

This is the inexperience of virtue.  Vice asks for nothing, as we have seen in Madame Marneffe; it gets everything offered to it.  Women of that stamp are never exacting till they have made themselves indispensable, or when a man has to be worked as a quarry is worked where the lime is rather scarce—­going to ruin, as the quarry-men say.

On hearing these words, “Two hundred thousand francs,” Crevel understood all.  He cheerfully raised the Baroness, saying insolently: 

“Come, come, bear up, mother,” which Adeline, in her distraction, failed to hear.  The scene was changing its character.  Crevel was becoming “master of the situation,” to use his own words.  The vastness of the sum startled Crevel so greatly that his emotion at seeing this handsome woman in tears at his feet was forgotten.  Besides, however angelical and saintly a woman may be, when she is crying bitterly her beauty disappears.  A Madame Marneffe, as has been seen, whimpers now and then, a tear trickles down her cheek; but as to melting into tears and making her eyes and nose red!—­never would she commit such a blunder.

“Come, child, compose yourself.—­Deuce take it!” Crevel went on, taking Madame Hulot’s hands in his own and patting them.  “Why do you apply to me for two hundred thousand francs?  What do you want with them?  Whom are they for?”

“Do not,” said she, “insist on any explanations.  Give me the money!  —­You will save three lives and the honor of our children.”

“And do you suppose, my good mother, that in all Paris you will find a man who at a word from a half-crazy woman will go off hic et nunc, and bring out of some drawer, Heaven knows where, two hundred thousand francs that have been lying simmering there till she is pleased to scoop them up?  Is that all you know of life and of business, my beauty?  Your folks are in a bad way; you may send them the last sacraments; for no one in Paris but her Divine Highness Madame la Banque, or the great Nucingen, or some miserable miser who is in love with gold as we other folks are with a woman, could produce such a miracle!  The civil list, civil as it may be, would beg you to call again tomorrow.  Every one invests his money, and turns it over to the best of his powers.

“You are quite mistaken, my angel, if you suppose that King Louis-Philippe rules us; he himself knows better than that.  He knows as well as we do that supreme above the Charter reigns the holy, venerated, substantial, delightful, obliging, beautiful, noble, ever-youthful, and all-powerful five-franc piece!  But money, my beauty, insists on interest, and is always engaged in seeking it!  ’God of the Jews, thou art supreme!’ says Racine.  The perennial parable of the golden calf, you see!—­In the days of Moses there was stock-jobbing in the desert!