During the five years of silver and gold Pere Cardot had laid by eighty thousand francs.  The old gentleman, wise from experience, foresaw that by the time he was seventy Florentine would be of age, probably engaged at the Opera, and, consequently, wanting all the luxury of a theatrical star.  Some days before the party mentioned by Georges, Pere Cardot had spent the sum of forty-five thousand francs in fitting up for his Florentine the former apartment of the late Coralie.  In Paris there are suites of rooms as well as houses and streets that have their predestinations.  Enriched with a magnificent service of plate, the “prima danseuse” of the Gaiete began to give dinners, spent three hundred francs a month on her dress, never went out except in a hired carriage, and had a maid for herself, a cook, and a little footman.

In fact, an engagement at the Opera was already in the wind.  The Cocon d’Or did homage to its first master by sending its most splendid products for the gratification of Mademoiselle Cabirolle, now called Florentine.  The magnificence which suddenly burst upon her apartment in the rue de Vendome would have satisfied the most ambitious supernumerary.  After being the master of the ship for seven years, Cardot now found himself towed along by a force of unlimited caprice.  But the luckless old gentleman was fond of his tyrant.  Florentine was to close his eyes; he meant to leave her a hundred thousand francs.  The iron age had now begun.

Georges Marest, with thirty thousand francs a year, and a handsome face, courted Florentine.  Every danseuse makes a point of having some young man who will take her to drive, and arrange the gay excursions into the country which all such women delight in.  However disinterested she may be, the courtship of such a star is a passion which costs some trifles to the favored mortal.  There are dinners at restaurants, boxes at the theatres, carriages to go to the environs and return, choice wines consumed in profusion,—­for an opera danseuse eats and drinks like an athlete.  Georges amused himself like other young men who pass at a jump from paternal discipline to a rich independence, and the death of his uncle, nearly doubling his means, had still further enlarged his ideas.  As long as he had only his patrimony of eighteen thousand francs a year, his intention was to become a notary, but (as his cousin remarked to the clerks of Desroches) a man must be stupid who begins a profession with the fortune most men hope to acquire in order to leave it.  Wiser then Georges, Frederic persisted in following the career of public office, and of putting himself, as we have seen, in training for it.

A young man as handsome and attractive as Georges might very well aspire to the hand of a rich creole; and the clerks in Desroches’ office, all of them the sons of poor parents, having never frequented the great world, or, indeed, known anything about it, put themselves into their best clothes on the following day, impatient enough to behold, and be presented to the Mexican Marquise de las Florentinas y Cabirolos.