“Who can have gone to complain to the Prefet? Whom does the woman belong to?”
And thus, without knowing each other, Jacques Collin, Peyrade, and Corentin were converging to a common point; while the unhappy Esther, Nucingen, and Lucien were inevitably entangled in the struggle which had already begun, and of which the point of pride, peculiar to police agents, was making a war to the death.
Thanks to Europe’s cleverness, the more pressing half of the sixty thousand francs of debt owed by Esther and Lucien was paid off. The creditors did not even lose confidence. Lucien and his evil genius could breathe for a moment. Like some pool, they could start again along the edge of the precipice where the strong man was guiding the weak man to the gibbet or to fortune.
“We are staking now,” said Carlos to his puppet, “to win or lose all. But, happily, the cards are beveled, and the punters young.”
For some time Lucien, by his terrible Mentor’s orders, had been very attentive to Madame de Serizy. It was, in fact, indispensable that Lucien should not be suspected of having kept a woman for his mistress. And in the pleasure of being loved, and the excitement of fashionable life, he found a spurious power of forgetting. He obeyed Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu by never seeing her excepting in the Bois or the Champs-Elysees.
On the day after Esther was shut up in the park-keeper’s house, the being who was to her so enigmatic and terrible, who weighed upon her soul, came to desire her to sign three pieces of stamped paper, made terrible by these fateful words: on the first, accepted payable for sixty thousand francs; on the second, accepted payable for a hundred and twenty thousand francs; on the third, accepted payable for a hundred and twenty thousand francs—three hundred thousand francs in all. By writing Bon pour, you simply promise to pay. The word accepted constitutes a bill of exchange, and makes you liable to imprisonment. The word entails, on the person who is so imprudent as to sign, the risk of five years’ imprisonment—a punishment which the police magistrate hardly ever inflicts, and which is reserved at the assizes for confirmed rogues. The law of imprisonment for debt is a relic of the days of barbarism, which combines with its stupidity the rare merit of being useless, inasmuch as it never catches swindlers.
“The point,” said the Spaniard to Esther, “is to get Lucien out of his difficulties. We have debts to the tune of sixty thousand francs, and with these three hundred thousand francs we may perhaps pull through.”
Having antedated the bills by six months, Carlos had had them drawn on Esther by a man whom the county court had “misunderstood,” and whose adventures, in spite of the excitement they had caused, were soon forgotten, hidden, lost, in the uproar of the great symphony of July 1830.
This young fellow, a most audacious adventurer, the son of a lawyer’s clerk of Boulogne, near Paris, was named Georges Marie Destourny. His father, obliged by adverse circumstances to sell his connection, died in 1824, leaving his son without the means of living, after giving him a brilliant education, the folly of the lower middle class. At twenty-three the clever young law-student had denied his paternity by printing on his cards
Georges d’Estourny.