Contenson, one of the most curious products of the scum that rises to the top of the seething Paris caldron, where everything ferments, prided himself on being, above all things, a philosopher.  He would say, without any bitter feeling: 

“I have great talents, but of what use are they?  I might as well have been an idiot.”

And he blamed himself instead of accusing mankind.  Find, if you can, many spies who have not had more venom about them than Contenson had.

“Circumstances are against me,” he would say to his chiefs.  “We might be fine crystal; we are but grains of sand, that is all.”

His indifference to dress had some sense.  He cared no more about his everyday clothes than an actor does; he excelled in disguising himself, in “make-up”; he could have given Frederic Lemaitre a lesson, for he could be a dandy when necessary.  Formerly, in his younger days, he must have mingled in the out-at-elbows society of people living on a humble scale.  He expressed excessive disgust for the criminal police corps; for, under the Empire, he had belonged to Fouche’s police, and looked upon him as a great man.  Since the suppression of this Government department, he had devoted his energies to the tracking of commercial defaulters; but his well-known talents and acumen made him a valuable auxiliary, and the unrecognized chiefs of the political police had kept his name on their lists.  Contenson, like his fellows, was only a super in the dramas of which the leading parts were played by his chief when a political investigation was in the wind.

“Go ’vay,” said Nucingen, dismissing his secretary with a wave of the hand.

“Why should this man live in a mansion and I in a lodging?” wondered Contenson to himself.  “He has dodged his creditors three times; he has robbed them; I never stole a farthing; I am a cleverer fellow than he is——­”

“Contenson, mein freund,” said the Baron, “you haf vat you call pleed me of one tousand-franc note.”

“My girl owed God and the devil——­”

“Vat, you haf a girl, a mistress!” cried Nucingen, looking at Contenson with admiration not unmixed with envy.

“I am but sixty-six,” replied Contenson, as a man whom vice has kept young as a bad example.

“And vat do she do?”

“She helps me,” said Contenson.  “When a man is a thief, and an honest woman loves him, either she becomes a thief or he becomes an honest man.  I have always been a spy.”

“And you vant money—­alvays?” asked Nucingen.

“Always,” said Contenson, with a smile.  “It is part of my business to want money, as it is yours to make it; we shall easily come to an understanding.  You find me a little, and I will undertake to spend it.  You shall be the well, and I the bucket.”

“Vould you like to haf one note for fife hundert franc?”

“What a question!  But what a fool I am!—­You do not offer it out of a disinterested desire to repair the slights of Fortune?”