“Vell, vell, I vill act qvite frankly.”
“Frankly—that is all I ask,” said Peyrade, “and frankness is the only thing at all new that you and I can offer to each other.”
“Frankly,” echoed the Baron. “Vere shall I put you down.”
“At the corner of the Pont Louis XVI.”
“To the Pont de la Chambre,” said the Baron to the footman at the carriage door.
“Then I am to get dat unknown person,” said the Baron to himself as he drove home.
“What a queer business!” thought Peyrade, going back on foot to the Palais-Royal, where he intended trying to multiply his ten thousand francs by three, to make a little fortune for Lydie. “Here I am required to look into the private concerns of a very young man who has bewitched my little girl by a glance. He is, I suppose, one of those men who have an eye for a woman,” said he to himself, using an expression of a language of his own, in which his observations, or Corentin’s, were summed up in words that were anything rather than classical, but, for that very reason, energetic and picturesque.
The Baron de Nucingen, when he went in, was an altered man; he astonished his household and his wife by showing them a face full of life and color, so cheerful did he feel.
“Our shareholders had better look out for themselves,” said du Tillet to Rastignac.
They were all at tea, in Delphine de Nucingen’s boudoir, having come in from the opera.