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Updated: June 20, 2025
"Ah, ha! mein Herr Baron, you shall hafe saved money last night!" said he, with a half-cunning, half-loutish German grin. Though men who are as rich as the Baron de Nucingen have more opportunities than others for losing money, they also have more chances of making it, even when they indulge their follies.
I have hit on a plan, daring but effectual, to keep our Baron and his agents quiet. You must go to see Madame de Serizy, and make yourself very agreeable to her. Tell her, in the course of conversation, that to oblige Rastignac, who has long been sick of Madame de Nucingen, you have consented to play fence for him to conceal a mistress.
Well, every day in Paris a hundred or more passions a la Nucingen come into being, and find expression in offering such rarities as queens dare not purchase, presented, kneeling, to baggages who, to use Asie's word, like to cut a dash.
"I must tell you that we are as rich as Baron de Nucingen himself. But the 'Imitation of Jesus Christ' forbids us to regard our wealth as our own. We are only the spenders of it; and if we had any pride in being that, we should not be worthy of dispensing it. It would not be transire benefaciendo; it would be inward enjoyment.
But man is born to be rained upon! "Next day the Baron received an anonymous letter something to this effect: 'Monsieur de Nucingen is dying of love for an unknown lady; he has already spent a great deal utterly in vain; if he will repair at midnight to the end of the Neuilly Bridge, and get into the carriage behind which the chasseur he saw at Vincennes will be standing, allowing himself to be blindfolded, he will see the woman he loves.
The baron reiterated his orders, the coachman urged the horses to a gallop, and at the Barriere du Trone had succeeded in overtaking a carriage resembling that in which Nucingen had seen the divine fair one, but which contained a swaggering head-clerk from some first-class shop and a lady of the Rue Vivienne. This blunder filled the Baron with consternation.
He is fond of me, well and good; I shall use my influence to make him invest my money as soon as possible in landed property in my own name. Very likely I could get him to buy back Nucingen in Alsace in my name; that has always been a pet idea of his. Still, come to-morrow and go through the books, and look into the business. M. Derville knows little of mercantile matters.
The luckless official went to Baron de Nucingen, to whom he now owed a mere trifle, and succeeded in borrowing forty thousand francs, on his salary pledged for two years more; the banker stipulated that in the event of Hulot's retirement on his pension, the whole of it should be devoted to the repayment of the sum borrowed till the capital and interest were all cleared off.
Nucingen he wrote, and eyed the forged signatures critically to see which seemed the most perfect copy. Suddenly he looked up as if a needle had pricked him. "You are not alone!" a boding voice seemed to cry in his heart; and indeed the forger saw a man standing at the little grated window of the counting-house, a man whose breathing was so noiseless that he did not seem to breathe at all.
'Mme. de Nucingen is out of spirits; I will tell you all about it, answered Rastignac, with the air of a man whose temper has been tried. 'A quarrel? hazarded Godefroid.
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