Hitherto, novelists of manners have placed on the stage a great many usurers; but the female money-lender has been overlooked, the Madame la Ressource of the present day--a very singular figure, euphemistically spoken of as a “ward-robe purchaser”; a part that the ferocious Asie could play, for she had two old-clothes shops managed by women she could trust--one in the Temple, and the other in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Marc. “You must get into the skin of Madame de Saint-Esteve,” said he. Herrera wished to see Asie dressed. The go-between arrived in a dress of flowered damask, made of the curtains of some dismantled boudoir, and one of those shawls of Indian design--out of date, worn, and valueless, which end their career on the backs of these women. She had a collar of magnificent lace, though torn, and a terrible bonnet; but her shoes were of fine kid, in which the flesh of her fat feet made a roll of black-lace stocking. “And my waist buckle!” she exclaimed, displaying a piece of suspicious-looking finery, prominent on her cook’s stomach, “There’s style for you! and my front!--Oh, Ma’me Nourrisson has turned me out quite spiff!” “Be as sweet as honey at first,” said Carlos; “be almost timid, as suspicious as a cat; and, above all, make the Baron ashamed of having employed the police, without betraying that you quake before the constable. Finally, make your customer understand in more or less plain terms that you defy all the police in the world to discover his jewel. Take care to destroy your traces. “When the Baron gives you a right to tap him on the stomach, and call him a pot-bellied old rip, you may be as insolent as you please, and make him trot like a footman.” Nucingen--threatened by Asie with never seeing her again if he attempted the smallest espionage--met the woman on his way to the Bourse, in secret, in a wretched entresol in the Rue Nueve-Saint-Marc. How often, and with what rapture, have amorous millionaires trodden these squalid paths! the pavements of Paris know. Madame de Saint-Esteve, by tossing the Baron from hope to despair by turns, brought him to the point when he insisted on being informed of all that related to the unknown beauty at ANY COST. Meanwhile, the law was put in force, and with such effect that the bailiffs, finding no resistance from Esther, put in an execution on her effects without losing a day. Lucien, guided by his adviser, paid the recluse at Saint-Germain five or six visits. The merciless author of all these machinations thought this necessary to save Esther from pining to death, for her beauty was now their capital. When the time came for them to quit the park-keeper’s lodge, he took Lucien and the poor girl to a place on the road whence they could see Paris, where no one could overhear them. They all three sat down in the rising sun, on the trunk of a felled poplar, looking over one of the finest prospects in the world, embracing the course of the Seine, with Montmartre, Paris, and Saint-Denis.