“What do you want?” asked he.
“To see Sainte-Pélagie,” she persistently replied.
Then Minoret hired a hackney coach, and took her to the Rue de la Clef, where the vehicle drew up in front of the squalid building—an ancient convent turned into a prison. The sight of the high gray walls, where every window was closely barred, of the low door, not to be entered without stooping—dreadful lesson!—the gloomy mass standing in a neighborhood full of poverty, where it rises in the midst of deserted streets, itself the supreme misery; the whole combination of dismal ideas choked Ursule, and made her shed tears.
“How is it,” said she, “that young men can be imprisoned for money? How is it that a debt gives to a moneylender such power as the king himself does not possess?—And he is there!” she exclaimed. “Where, godfather?” she added, looking from one window to another.
“Ursule,” said her godfather, “you make me commit follies. This is not forgetting him!”
“But,” said she, “even if I must give him up, must I feel no interest in him? I may love him, and marry no one.”
“Oh!” cried the old man, “there is so much method in your madness, that I repent of having brought you.”
Three days later the old man had the receipts in due form, the title-deeds, and all the documents which were necessary to liberate Savinien. The liquidation, including the agent’s commission, had been effected for the sum of eighty thousand francs. The doctor had in hand eight hundred thousand francs, which, by his lawyer’s advice, he placed in treasury notes, so as not to lose too much interest. He kept twenty thousand in bank notes for Savinien.
The doctor himself went to release him on Saturday at two o’clock, and the young Vicomte, already informed by a letter from his mother, thanked his deliverer with sincere effusiveness of feeling.
“You must not delay in coming home to see your mother,” said old Minoret.
Savinien replied, in some confusion, that even in prison he had contracted a debt of honor; and he told the doctor of the visit of his three friends.
“I suspected that you might have some personal debts,” said the doctor with a smile. “Your mother has borrowed a hundred thousand francs, but I have paid no more than eighty thousand; here is the remainder, use it with thrift, monsieur, and regard what is left as your stake on the green cloth of fortune.”
During the past week Savinien had reflected on the times he lived in. Competition on all sides demands severe labor from those who hope to make a fortune. Illegal methods require more talent and underhand manoeuvres, than enterprise under the light of day. Success in the gay world, far from securing a position, absorbs time and a great deal of money. The name of Portenduère, omnipotent according to his mother, was nothing in Paris. His cousin the deputy, the Comte de Portenduère, cut but a small figure in the midst of the elective Chamber in comparison with the Peerage and Court, and had no more influence than enough for himself. Admiral Kergarouët existed only in the person of his wife. He had seen orators, men who had risen from a social rank beneath the nobility or the simple gentry, become personages of importance. In short, money was the pivot, the only means, the only motor of a society which Louis XVIII had tried to form in imitation of that of England.
On his way from the Rue de la Clef to the Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, the young gentleman summed up his meditations, and laid them before the old doctor, in accordance with de Marsay’s advice.
“I must let myself be forgotten,” said he, “for three or four years, and try to find a career. Perhaps I may make a name in political diplomacy or in moral statistics, by some treatise on one of the questions of the day. At any rate, while finding some young person whom I may marry, and whose position may qualify me for election, I shall work in silence and obscurity.”
The doctor studied the young man’s countenance, and saw in it the fixed purpose of a man who, having been wounded, hopes for revenge. He greatly approved this scheme.
“My young neighbor,” said he, “if you have cast the skin of the old nobility—which is not found to be good wear nowadays—after three or four years of a steady industrious life, I will undertake to find you a superior girl, pretty, amiable, pious, and with a fortune of seven or eight hundred thousand francs, who will make you happy, and of whom you may be proud, though she has no nobility but that of the heart.”
“Eh, doctor!” cried the young man, “there is no nobility left—only an aristocracy.”
“Go and pay your debts of honor, and return here. I will go to engage the coupé of the diligence, for my ward is with me,” said the old man.
That evening, at six o’clock, the three travelers set out from the Rue Dauphiné by the “Ducler.” Ursule, who wore a veil, spoke not a word. After blowing her the kiss in an impulse of trivial flirtation, which had upset Ursule as much as a whole book of love, Savinien had totally forgotten the doctor’s ward in the torments of his debts; and, indeed, his hopeless adoration of Emilie de Kergarouët did not suffer him to bestow a remembrance on the glances he had interchanged with a
