conducting the affair, that he might get the profits of his theft
without the shame of it. He felt the necessity of having under his
thumb one of those living lay-figures called in commercial language a
"man of straw." His former tool at the Bourse struck him as a suitable
person for the post; he accordingly trenched upon Divine right, and
created a man. Out of a former commercial traveller, who was without
means or capacity of any kind, except that of talking indefinitely on
all subjects and saying nothing, who was without a farthing or a
chance to make one,--able, nevertheless, to understand a part and act
it without compromising the play or the actors in it, and possessed of
a rare sort of honor, that of keeping a secret and letting himself be
dishonored to screen his employers,--out of such a being du Tillet now
made a banker, who set on foot and directed vast enterprises; the
head, namely, of the house of Claparon.

The fate of Charles Claparon would be, if du Tillet's scheme ended in
bankruptcy, a swift deliverance to the tender mercies of Jews and
Pharisees; and he well knew it. But to a poor devil who was
despondently roaming the boulevard with a future of forty sous in his
pocket when his old comrade du Tillet chanced to meet him, the little
gains that he was to get out of the affair seemed an Eldorado. His
friendship, his devotion, to du Tillet, increased by unreflecting
gratitude and stimulated by the wants of a libertine and vagabond
life, led him to say _amen_ to everything. Having sold his honor, he
saw it risked with so much caution that he ended by attaching himself
to his old comrade as a dog to his master. Claparon was an ugly
poodle, but as ready to jump as Curtius. In the present affair he was
to represent half the purchasers of the land, while Cesar Birotteau
represented the other half. The notes which Claparon was to receive
from Birotteau were to be discounted by one of the usurers whose name