as he.  But, I say, you are a funny fellow, old man, to flash us a ball like that, and two months after try to renew your paper!  You seem to have some go in you.  Let’s do business together.  You have got a reputation which would be very useful to me.  Oh! du Tillet was born to understand Gobseck.  Du Tillet will come to a bad end at the Bourse.  If he is, as they say, the tool of old Gobseck, he won’t be allowed to go far.  Gobseck sits in a corner of his web like an old spider who has travelled round the world.  Sooner or later, ztit! the usurer will toss him off as I do this glass of wine.  So much the better!  Du Tillet has played me a trick—­oh! a damnable trick.”

At the end of an hour and a half spend in just such senseless chatter, Birotteau attempted to get away, seeing that the late commercial traveller was about to relate the adventure of a republican deputy of Marseilles, in love with a certain actress then playing the part of la belle Arsene, who, on one occasion, was hissed by a royalist crowd in the pit.

“He stood up in his box,” said Claparon, “and shouted:  ’Arrest whoever hissed her!  Eugh!  If it’s a woman, I’ll kiss her; if it’s a man, we’ll see about it; if it’s neither the one nor the other, may God’s lightning blast it!’ Guess how it ended.”

“Adieu, monsieur,” said Birotteau.

“You will have to come and see me,” said Claparon; “that first scrap of paper you gave Cayron has come back to us protested; I endorsed it, so I’ve paid it.  I shall send after you; business before everything.”

Birotteau felt stabbed to the heart by this cold and grinning kindness as much as by the harshness of Keller or the coarse German banter of Nucingen.  The familiarity of the man, and his grotesque gabble excited by champagne, seemed to tarnish the soul of the honest bourgeois as though he came from a house of financial ill-fame.  He went down the stairway and found himself in the streets without knowing where he was going.  As he walked along the boulevards and reached the Rue Saint-Denis, he recollected Molineux, and turned into the Cour Batave.  He went up the dirty, tortuous staircase which he once trod so proudly.  He recalled to mind the mean and niggardly acrimony of Molineux, and he shrank from imploring his favor.  The landlord was sitting in the chimney-corner, as on the occasion of Cesar’s first visit, but his breakfast was now in process of digestion.  Birotteau proffered his request.

“Renew a note for twelve hundred francs?” said Molineux, with mocking incredulity.  “Have you got to that, monsieur?  If you have not twelve hundred francs to pay me on the 15th, do you intend to send back my receipt for the rent unpaid?  I shall be sorry; but I have not the smallest civility in money-matters,—­my rents are my living.  Without them how could I pay what I owe myself?  No merchant will deny the soundness of that principle.  Money is no respecter of persons; money has no ears, it has no heart.  The winter is hard, the price of wood has gone up.  If you don’t pay me on the 15th, a little summons will be served upon you at twelve o’clock on the 16th.  Bah! the worthy Mitral, your bailiff, is mine as well; he will send you the writ in an envelope, with all the consideration due to your high position.”