“Happy!” said she, raising her eyes to heaven.

“You have lived in Paradise for four years,” said he.  “Can you not live on such memories?”

“I will obey you,” said she, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.  “For the rest, do not worry yourself.  You have said it; my love is a mortal disease.”

“That is not enough,” said Carlos; “you must preserve your looks.  At a little past two-and-twenty you are in the prime of your beauty, thanks to your past happiness.  And, above all, be the ‘Torpille’ again.  Be roguish, extravagant, cunning, merciless to the millionaire I put in your power.  Listen to me!  That man is a robber on a grand scale; he has been ruthless to many persons; he has grown fat on the fortunes of the widow and the orphan; you will avenge them!

“Asie is coming to fetch you in a hackney coach, and you will be in Paris this evening.  If you allow any one to suspect your connection with Lucien, you may as well blow his brains out at once.  You will be asked where you have been for so long.  You must say that you have been traveling with a desperately jealous Englishman.—­You used to have wit enough to humbug people.  Find such wit again now.”

Have you ever seen a gorgeous kite, the giant butterfly of childhood, twinkling with gilding, and soaring to the sky?  The children forget the string that holds it, some passer-by cuts it, the gaudy toy turns head over heels, as the boys say, and falls with terrific rapidity.  Such was Esther as she listened to Carlos.

WHAT LOVE COSTS AN OLD MAN

For a whole week Nucingen went almost every day to the shop in the Rue Nueve-Saint-Marc to bargain for the woman he was in love with.  Here, sometimes under the name of Saint-Esteve, sometimes under that of her tool, Madame Nourrisson, Asie sat enthroned among beautiful clothes in that hideous condition when they have ceased to be dresses and are not yet rags.

The setting was in harmony with the appearance assumed by the woman, for these shops are among the most hideous characteristics of Paris.  You find there the garments tossed aside by the skinny hand of Death; you hear, as it were, the gasping of consumption under a shawl, or you detect the agonies of beggery under a gown spangled with gold.  The horrible struggle between luxury and starvation is written on filmy laces; you may picture the countenance of a queen under a plumed turban placed in an attitude that recalls and almost reproduces the absent features.  It is all hideous amid prettiness!  Juvenal’s lash, in the hands of the appraiser, scatters the shabby muffs, the ragged furs of courtesans at bay.

There is a dunghill of flowers, among which here and there we find a bright rose plucked but yesterday and worn for a day; and on this an old hag is always to be seen crouching—­first cousin to Usury, the skinflint bargainer, bald and toothless, and ever ready to sell the contents, so well is she used to sell the covering—­the gown without the woman, or the woman without the gown!