His fortune was well known; he had a credit account up to seven hundred thousand francs in the great banking house of du Tillet; but he was always seen alone. When he went to "first nights," he was in a stall. He frequented no drawing-rooms. He had never given his arm to a girl on the streets. His name would not be coupled with that of any pretty woman of the world. To pass his time he played whist at the Jockey-Club. The world was reduced to calumny, or, which it thought funnier, to laughing at his peculiarities; he went by the name of Combabus. Bixiou, Leon de Lora, Lousteau, Florine, Mademoiselle Heloise Brisetout, and Nathan, supping one evening with the notorious Carabine, with a large party of _lions_ and _lionesses_, had invented this name with an excessively burlesque explanation. Massol, as being on the Council of State, and Claude Vignon, erewhile Professor of Greek, had related to the ignorant damsels the famous anecdote, preserved in Rollin's _Ancient History_, concerning Combabus, that voluntary Abelard who was placed in charge of the wife of a King of Assyria, Persia, Bactria, Mesopotamia, and other geographical divisions peculiar to old Professor du Bocage, who continued the work of d'Anville, the creator of the East of antiquity. This nickname, which gave Carabine's guests laughter for a quarter of an hour, gave rise to a series of over-free jests, to which the Academy could not award the Montyon prize; but among which the name was taken up, to rest thenceforth on the curly mane of the handsome Baron, called by Josepha the splendid Brazilian--as one might say a splendid _Catoxantha_. Carabine, the loveliest of her tribe, whose delicate beauty and amusing wit had snatched the sceptre of the Thirteenth Arrondissement from the hands of Mademoiselle Turquet, better known by the name of Malaga--Mademoiselle Seraphine Sinet (this was her real name) was to du Tillet the banker what Josepha Mirah was to the Duc d'Herouville. Now, on the morning of the very day when Madame de Saint-Esteve had prophesied success to Victorin, Carabine had said to du Tillet at about seven o'clock: "If you want to be very nice, you will give me a dinner at the _Rocher de Cancale_ and bring Combabus. We want to know, once for all, whether he has a mistress.--I bet that he has, and I should like to win." "He is still at the Hotel des Princes; I will call," replied du Tillet. "We will have some fun. Ask all the youngsters--the youngster Bixiou, the youngster Lora, in short, all the clan." At half-past seven that evening, in the handsomest room of the restaurant where all Europe has dined, a splendid silver service was spread, made on purpose for entertainments where vanity pays the bill in bank-notes. A flood of light fell in ripples on the chased rims; waiters, whom a provincial might have taken for diplomatists but for their age, stood solemnly, as knowing themselves to be overpaid.