It will now be necessary to explain how Monsieur le Baron Hulot had
contrived to count up his expenditure on Hortense's wedding portion,
and at the same time to defray the frightful cost of the charming
rooms where Madame Marneffe was to make her home. His financial scheme
bore that stamp of talent which leads prodigals and men in love into
the quagmires where so many disasters await them. Nothing can
demonstrate more completely the strange capacity communicated by vice,
to which we owe the strokes of skill which ambitious or voluptuous men
can occasionally achieve--or, in short, any of the Devil's pupils.
On the day before, old Johann Fischer, unable to pay thirty thousand
francs drawn for on him by his nephew, had found himself under the
necessity of stopping payment unless the Baron could remit the sum.
This ancient worthy, with the white hairs of seventy years, had such
blind confidence in Hulot--who, to the old Bonapartist, was an
emanation from the Napoleonic sun--that he was calmly pacing his
anteroom with the bank clerk, in the little ground-floor apartment
that he rented for eight hundred francs a year as the headquarters of
his extensive dealings in corn and forage.
"Marguerite is gone to fetch the money from close by," said he.
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