“If only I had prought Chorge inshtead of you, shtupid fool, he should have fount dat voman,” said he to the servant, while the excise officers were searching the carriage.

“Indeed, Monsieur le Baron, the devil was behind the chaise, I believe, disguised as an armed escort, and he sent this chaise instead of hers.”

“Dere is no such ting as de Teufel,” said the Baron.

The Baron de Nucingen owned to sixty; he no longer cared for women, and for his wife least of all.  He boasted that he had never known such love as makes a fool of a man.  He declared that he was happy to have done with women; the most angelic of them, he frankly said, was not worth what she cost, even if you got her for nothing.  He was supposed to be so entirely blase, that he no longer paid two thousand francs a month for the pleasure of being deceived.  His eyes looked coldly down from his opera box on the corps de ballet; never a glance was shot at the capitalist by any one of that formidable swarm of old young girls, and young old women, the cream of Paris pleasure.

Natural love, artificial and love-of-show love, love based on self-esteem and vanity, love as a display of taste, decent, conjugal love, eccentric love—­the Baron had paid for them all, had known them all excepting real spontaneous love.  This passion had now pounced down on him like an eagle on its prey, as it did on Gentz, the confidential friend of His Highness the Prince of Metternich.  All the world knows what follies the old diplomate committed for Fanny Elssler, whose rehearsals took up a great deal more of his time than the concerns of Europe.

The woman who had just overthrown that iron-bound money-box, called Nucingen, had appeared to him as one of those who are unique in their generation.  It is not certain that Titian’s mistress, or Leonardo da Vinci’s Monna Lisa, or Raphael’s Fornarina were as beautiful as this exquisite Esther, in whom not the most practised eye of the most experienced Parisian could have detected the faintest trace of the ordinary courtesan.  The Baron was especially startled by the noble and stately air, the air of a well-born woman, which Esther, beloved, and lapped in luxury, elegance, and devotedness, had in the highest degree.  Happy love is the divine unction of women; it makes them all as lofty as empresses.

For eight nights in succession the Baron went to the forest of Vincennes, then to the Bois de Boulogne, to the woods of Ville-d’Avray, to Meudon, in short, everywhere in the neighborhood of Paris, but failed to meet Esther.  That beautiful Jewish face, which he called “a face out of te Biple,” was always before his eyes.  By the end of a fortnight he had lost his appetite.