“I am in despair, my dear boy,” said his visitor, “at finding myself compelled to deliver a message which is intrusted to me because we are known to be intimate. Your marriage is broken off beyond all hope of reconciliation. Never set foot again in the Hotel de Grandlieu. To marry Clotilde you must wait till her father dies, and he is too selfish to die yet awhile. Old whist-players sit at table--the card-table--very late. “Clotilde is setting out for Italy with Madeleine de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu. The poor girl is so madly in love with you, my dear fellow, that they have to keep an eye on her; she was bent on coming to see you, and had plotted an escape. That may comfort you in misfortune!” Lucien made no reply; he sat gazing at Rastignac. “And is it a misfortune, after all?” his friend went on. “You will easily find a girl as well born and better looking than Clotilde! Madame de Serizy will find you a wife out of spite; she cannot endure the Grandlieus, who never would have anything to say to her. She has a niece, little Clemence du Rouvre----” “My dear boy,” said Lucien at length, “since that supper I am not on terms with Madame de Serizy--she saw me in Esther’s box and made a scene--and I left her to herself.” “A woman of forty does not long keep up a quarrel with so handsome a man as you are,” said Rastignac. “I know something of these sunsets.--It lasts ten minutes in the sky, and ten years in a woman’s heart.” “I have waited a week to hear from her.” “Go and call.” “Yes, I must now.” “Are you coming at any rate to the Val-Noble’s? Her nabob is returning the supper given by Nucingen.” “I am asked, and I shall go,” said Lucien gravely. The day after this confirmation of his disaster, which Carlos heard of at once from Asie, Lucien went to the Rue Taitbout with Rastignac and Nucingen. At midnight nearly all the personages of this drama were assembled in the dining-room that had formerly been Esther’s--a drama of which the interest lay hidden under the very bed of these tumultuous lives, and was known only to Esther, to Lucien, to Peyrade, to Contenson, the mulatto, and to Paccard, who attended his mistress. Asie, without its being known to Contenson and Peyrade, had been asked by Madame du Val-Noble to come and help her cook. As they sat down to table, Peyrade, who had given Madame du Val-Noble five hundred francs that the thing might be well done, found under his napkin a scrap of paper on which these words were written in pencil, “The ten days are up at the moment when you sit down to supper.” Peyrade handed the paper to Contenson, who was standing behind him, saying in English: “Did you put my name here?”