“You mean Gigonnet, that good little Gigonnet, easy-going—”
“Yes,” said Cesar; “but I wish,—and here I count upon your honor and delicacy,—”
Claparon bowed.
“—to renew those notes.”
“Impossible!” snapped the banker. “I’m not alone in the matter. We have met in council,—regular Chamber; but we all agreed like bacon in a frying-pan. The devil! we deliberated. Those lands about the Madeleine don’t amount to anything; we are operating elsewhere. Hey! my dear sir, if we were not involved in the Champs Elysees and at the Bourse which they are going to finish, and in the quartier Saint-Lazare and at Tivoli, we shouldn’t be, as that fat Nucingen says, in peaseness at all. What’s the Madeleine to us?—a midge of a thing. Pr-r-r! We don’t play low, my good fellow,” he said, tapping Birotteau on the stomach and catching him round the waist. “Come, let’s have our breakfast, and talk,” added Claparon, wishing to soften his refusal.
“Very good,” said Birotteau. “So much the worse for the other guest,” he thought, meaning to make Claparon drunk, and to find out who were his real associates in an affair which began to look suspicious to him.
“All right! Victoire!” called the banker.
This call brought a regular Leonarde, tricked out like a fish-woman.
“Tell the clerks that I can’t see any one,—not even Nucingen, Keller, Gigonnet, and all the rest of them.”
“No one has come but Monsieur Lempereur.”