Visitors called to see Nucingen on business; but he waited for Contenson, he was dreaming of Esther, telling himself that before long he would see again the woman who had aroused in him such unhoped-for emotions, and he sent everybody away with vague replies and double-edged promises.  Contenson was to him the most important person in Paris, and he looked out into the garden every minute.  Finally, after giving orders that no one else was to be admitted, he had his breakfast served in the summer-house at one corner of the garden.  In the banker’s office the conduct and hesitancy of the most knowing, the most clearsighted, the shrewdest of Paris financiers seemed inexplicable.

“What ails the chief?” said a stockbroker to one of the head-clerks.

“No one knows; they are anxious about his health, it would seem.  Yesterday, Madame la Baronne got Desplein and Bianchon to meet.”

One day, when Sir Isaac Newton was engaged in physicking one of his dogs, named “Beauty” (who, as is well known, destroyed a vast amount of work, and whom he reproved only in these words, “Ah!  Beauty, you little know the mischief you have done!"), some strangers called to see him; but they at once retired, respecting the great man’s occupation.  In every more or less lofty life, there is a little dog “Beauty.”  When the Marechal de Richelieu came to pay his respects to Louis XV. after taking Mahon, one of the greatest feats of arms of the eighteenth century, the King said to him, “Have you heard the great news?  Poor Lansmatt is dead.”—­Lansmatt was a gatekeeper in the secret of the King’s intrigues.

The bankers of Paris never knew how much they owed to Contenson.  That spy was the cause of Nucingen’s allowing an immense loan to be issued in which his share was allotted to him, and which he gave over to them.  The stock-jobber could aim at a fortune any day with the artillery of speculation, but the man was a slave to the hope of happiness.

The great banker drank some tea, and was nibbling at a slice of bread and butter, as a man does whose teeth have for long been sharpened by appetite, when he heard a carriage stop at the little garden gate.  In a few minutes his secretary brought in Contenson, whom he had run to earth in a cafe not far from Sainte-Pelagie, where the man was breakfasting on the strength of a bribe given to him by an imprisoned debtor for certain allowances that must be paid for.

Contenson, you must know, was a whole poem—­a Paris poem.  Merely to see him would have been enough to tell you that Beaumarchais’ Figaro, Moliere’s Mascarille, Marivaux’s Frontin, and Dancourt’s Lafleur —­those great representatives of audacious swindling, of cunning driven to bay, of stratagem rising again from the ends of its broken wires—­were all quite second-rate by comparison with this giant of cleverness and meanness.  When in Paris you find a real type, he is no longer a man, he is a spectacle; no longer a factor in life, but a whole life, many lives.