"What, is the house then really in danger?"
"Danger! sir, why it is nearly on fire. Your heart is getting diseased, your lungs are touched, your blood is actually scented and coloured with the truffles you have eaten. Why, your very nose (pray excuse the freedom of our remark), your roseate nose bears testimony to what we say."
"Alas, alas! this is I fear the truth; but, gentlemen, if I leave Paris, what on earth will become of the Great Northern and the Orleans Railways, and the funds,—my dividends, rents, and bad debts?"
"And your feverish pulse, sir, your wrinkled liver, and your digestion, which scarcely ever allows you to close your eyes?"
"Yes! yes,—but my Spanish fives and Mexican bonds?"
"And your bilious eyes and eyelids full of crows' feet, and the gout and the rheumatism which excruciate you?—those horrid spiders which are weaving their threads in the muscles of your calves?"
"But my carrier-pigeons, gentlemen, source of my tenderest care; the brokerage, the speculation for the account, and my good friend, the Minister of the Interior, and of the Travaux Publics; and the snowball of my fortune, which must stop unproductive till I recover;—how can I leave all these to fate?"
"Think of your respiration, which is disorganized, and the vital principle, the torch of life, which flickers up and down in the socket, and ere many weeks will be extinguished, unless you at once take our advice."
"What!" continued the votary of wealth,—"what! cannot gold purchase health, most sapient doctors?"