“I know all about him,” replied Rastignac; “do you suppose there are no other detectives in Paris? I know that since 1830, when he took Bibi-Lupin’s place as chief of the detective police, he has given his life a most respectable bourgeois character; the only fault I find is that he overdoes it.”
“And yet—” said the colonel.
“He is rich,” continued Rastignac, not heeding the interruption. “His salary is twelve thousand francs, and he has the three hundred thousand Lucien de Rubempre left him,—also the proceeds of a manufactory of varnished leather which he started at Gentilly; it pays him a large profit. His aunt, Jacqueline Collin, who lives with him, still does a shady business secretly, which of course brings in large fees, and I have the best of reasons for believing that they both gamble at the Bourse. He is so anxious to keep out of the mud that he has gone to the other extreme. Every evening he plays dominoes, like any bourgeois, in a cafe near the Prefecture, and Sundays he goes out to a little box of a place he has bought near the forest of Romainville, in the Saint-Gervais meadows; there he cultivates blue dahlias, and talked, last year, of crowning a Rosiere. All that, my dear colonel, is too bucolic to allow of my employing him on any political police-work.”
“I think myself,” said Franchessini, “that in order not to attract attention, he rolls himself too much into a ball.”
“Make him unwind, and then, if he wants to return to active life and take a hand in politics, he may find some honest way of doing so. He’ll never make a Saint Vincent de Paul,—though the saint was at the galleys once upon a time; but there are plenty of ways in which he could get a third or fourth class reputation. If Monsieur de Saint-Esteve, as he now calls himself, takes that course, and I am still in power, tell him to come and see me; I might employ him then.”
“That is something, certainly,” said Franchessini, aloud; but he thought to himself that since the days of the pension Vauquer the minister had taken long strides and that roles had changed between himself and Vautrin.
“You can tell him what I say,” continued Rastignac, going up the steps of the portico, “but be cautious how you word it.”
“Don’t be uneasy,” replied the colonel. “I will speak to him judiciously, for he’s a man who must not be pushed too far; there are some old scores in life one can’t wipe out.”
The minister, by making no reply to this remark, seemed to admit the truth of it.
“You must be in the Chamber when the king opens it; we shall want all the enthusiasm we can muster,” said Rastignac to the colonel, as they parted.