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"And it is to your kind offices, no doubt," said la Peyrade, "that I shall owe that precious result?" "Yes, I may boast of it," replied du Portail, "for, in order to tow you into port it has been necessary to strip you of your rigging; unless that were done, you would always have tried to navigate under your own sails the bourgeois shoals that you are now among."
Who is the tenant on your first floor?" "Monsieur du Portail. He has lodged here these thirty years. He is a man with a good income, monsieur; highly respectable, and elderly. You know people who invest in the Funds live on their incomes. He used to be in business.
There comes many sorte of birds that makes there nest here, the goilants, which is a white sea-bird of the bignesse of pigeon, which makes me believe what the wildmen told me concerning the sea to be neare directly to the point. It's like a great Portail, by reason of the beating of the waves. The lower part of that oppening is as bigg as a tower, and grows bigger in the going up.
"Well," said Cerizet, "I think I have another nice little insidious means of demolishing him with Thuillier." "Say what it is, then!" exclaimed du Portail, impatiently; "you go round and round the pot as if I were a man it would do you some good to finesse with."
'Necessity, says Figaro, 'obliterates distance. Thuillier needs him to push his candidacy in the quartier Saint-Jacques, so they kissed and made up." "And no doubt," said du Portail, without much appearance of feeling, "the marriage is fixed for an early day?" "Yes," replied Cerizet, "but there's another piece of work on hand.
Presently, in his shirt-sleeves, with a pipe between his lips, Cerizet made one of those masterly strokes which bring down the house with frantic applause. As he waited a moment, looking about him triumphantly, his eye lighted on a terrible kill-joy. Standing among the spectators with his chin on his cane, du Portail was steadily watching him. A tinge of red showed itself in Cerizet's cheeks.
"Something that concerns you; or rather, something that we must do together. Du Portail, who is too busy to attend to business just now, has sent me in here to see you, and consult as to the best means of putting a spoke in Thuillier's election; it seems that the government is determined to prevent his winning it. Have you any ideas about it?"
Then, after a moment's reflection, he added, "I think you did newspaper work once upon a time; I remember 'the courageous Cerizet." "Yes," replied the usurer, "I even managed one with la Peyrade, an evening paper; and a pretty piece of work we did, for which we were finely recompensed." "Well," said du Portail, "why don't you do it again, journalism, I mean, with la Peyrade."
In your family he was thought to be a millionaire; and, dying suddenly, you remember, before you got to him, he did not leave enough for his burial; a pauper's grave was all that remained to him." "Did you know him?" asked la Peyrade. "He was my oldest and dearest friend," replied du Portail.
"You were spoken to, at my instigation, about a marriage," resumed du Portail. "This marriage, as I think, is closely connected with a past existence from which a certain hereditary or family duty has devolved upon you. Do you know what that uncle of yours, to whom you applied in 1829, was doing in Paris?
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