“Bah! I have twenty thousand francs a year--just enough to keep up my stables. I was thoroughly done, my dear fellow, in that Nucingen business; I will tell you about that.--I have got my sisters married; that is the clearest profit I can show since we last met; and I would rather have them provided for than have five hundred thousand francs a year. No, what would you have me do? I am ambitious. To what can Madame de Nucingen lead? A year more and I shall be shelved, stuck in a pigeon-hole like a married man. I have all the discomforts of marriage and of single life, without the advantages of either; a false position to which every man must come who remains tied too long to the same apron-string.” “So you think you will come upon a treasure here?” said Bianchon. “Your Marquise, my dear fellow, does not hit my fancy at all.” “Your liberal opinions blur your eyesight. If Madame d’Espard were a Madame Rabourdin...” “Listen to me. Noble or simple, she would still have no soul; she would still be a perfect type of selfishness. Take my word for it, medical men are accustomed to judge of people and things; the sharpest of us read the soul while we study the body. In spite of that pretty boudoir where we have spent this evening, in spite of the magnificence of the house, it is quite possible that Madame la Marquise is in debt.” “What makes you think so?” “I do not assert it; I am supposing. She talked of her soul as Louis XVIII. used to talk of his heart. I tell you this: That fragile, fair woman, with her chestnut hair, who pities herself that she may be pitied, enjoys an iron constitution, an appetite like a wolf’s, and the strength and cowardice of a tiger. Gauze, and silk, and muslin were never more cleverly twisted round a lie! Ecco.” “Bianchon, you frighten me! You have learned a good many things, then, since we lived in the Maison Vauquer?” “Yes, since then, my boy, I have seen puppets, both dolls and manikins. I know something of the ways of the fine ladies whose bodies we attend to, saving that which is dearest to them, their child--if they love it--or their pretty faces, which they always worship. A man spends his nights by their pillow, wearing himself to death to spare them the slightest loss of beauty in any part; he succeeds, he keeps their secret like the dead; they send to ask for his bill, and think it horribly exorbitant. Who saved them? Nature. Far from recommending him, they speak ill of him, fearing lest he should become the physician of their best friends. “My dear fellow, those women of whom you say, ‘They are angels!’ I--I--have seen stripped of the little grimaces under which they hide their soul, as well as of the frippery under which they disguise their defects--without manners and without stays; they are not beautiful.