“Oh! so it is she who has fallen heir to my house in the Rue Saint-Georges,” observed Madame du Val-Noble with some bitterness; for she, as she phrased it, was on the loose.

“Most likely,” said the Colonel.  “Du Tillet told me that the Baron had spent three times as much there as your poor Falleix.”

“Let us go round to her box,” said Tullia.

“Not if I know it,” said Mariette; “she is much too handsome, I will call on her at home.”

“I think myself good-looking enough to risk it,” remarked Tullia.

So the much-daring leading dancer went round between the acts and renewed acquaintance with Esther, who would talk only on general subjects.

“And where have you come back from, my dear child?” asked Tullia, who could not restrain her curiosity.

“Oh, I was for five years in a castle in the Alps with an Englishman, as jealous as a tiger, a nabob; I called him a nabot, a dwarf, for he was not so big as le bailli de Ferrette.

“And then I came across a banker—­from a savage to salvation, as Florine might say.  And now here I am in Paris again; I long so for amusement that I mean to have a rare time.  I shall keep open house.  I have five years of solitary confinement to make good, and I am beginning to do it.  Five years of an Englishman is rather too much; six weeks are the allowance according to the advertisements.”

“Was it the Baron who gave you that lace?”

“No, it is a relic of the nabob.—­What ill-luck I have, my dear!  He was as yellow as a friend’s smile at a success; I thought he would be dead in ten months.  Pooh! he was a strong as a mountain.  Always distrust men who say they have a liver complaint.  I will never listen to a man who talks of his liver.—­I have had too much of livers—­who cannot die.  My nabob robbed me; he died without making a will, and the family turned me out of doors like a leper.—­So, then, I said to my fat friend here, ’Pay for two!’—­You may as well call me Joan of Arc; I have ruined England, and perhaps I shall die at the stake——­”

“Of love?” said Tullia.

“And burnt alive,” answered Esther, and the question made her thoughtful.

The Baron laughed at all this vulgar nonsense, but he did not always follow it readily, so that his laughter sounded like the forgotten crackers that go off after fireworks.

We all live in a sphere of some kind, and the inhabitants of every sphere are endowed with an equal share of curiosity.

Next evening at the opera, Esther’s reappearance was the great news behind the scenes.  Between two and four in the afternoon all Paris in the Champs-Elysees had recognized La Torpille, and knew at last who was the object of the Baron de Nucingen’s passion.

“Do you know,” Blondet remarked to de Marsay in the greenroom at the opera-house, “that La Torpille vanished the very day after the evening when we saw her here and recognized her in little Rubempre’s mistress.”