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“What do you say of THAT? First cousin to Death, isn’t she?” said Leon in Gazonal’s ear, showing him, at the desk, a terrible individual. “Well, she calls herself Madame Nourrisson.”

“Madame, how much is this guipure?” asked the manufacturer, intending to compete in liveliness with the two artists.

“To you, monsieur, who come from the country, it will be only three hundred francs,” she replied. Then, remarking in his manner a sort of eagerness peculiar to Southerners, she added, in a grieved tone, “It formerly belonged to that poor Princess de Lamballe.”

“What! do you dare exhibit it so near the palace?” cried Bixiou.

“Monsieur, THEY don’t believe in it,” she replied.

“Madame, we have not come to make purchases,” said Bixiou, with a show of frankness.

“So I see, monsieur,” returned Madame Nourrisson.

“We have several things to sell,” said the illustrious caricaturist. “I live close by, rue de Richelieu, 112, sixth floor. If you will come round there for a moment, you may perhaps make some good bargains.”

Ten minutes later Madame Nourrisson did in fact present herself at Bixiou’s lodgings, where by that time he had taken Leon and Gazonal. Madame Nourrisson found them all three as serious as authors whose collaboration does not meet with the success it deserves.

“Madame,” said the intrepid hoaxer, showing her a pair of women’s slippers, “these belonged formerly to the Empress Josephine.”

He felt it incumbent on him to return change for the Prince de Lamballe.

“Those!” she exclaimed; “they were made this year; look at the mark.”

“Don’t you perceive that the slippers are only by way of preface?” said Leon; “though, to be sure, they are usually the conclusion of a tale.”

“My friend here,” said Bixiou, motioning to Gazonal, “has an immense family interest in ascertaining whether a young lady of a good and wealthy house, whom he wishes to marry, has ever gone wrong.”

“How much will monsieur give for the information,” she asked, looking at Gazonal, who was no longer surprised by anything.

“One hundred francs,” he said.

“No, thank you!” she said with a grimace of refusal worthy of a macaw.

“Then say how much you want, my little Madame Nourrisson,” cried Bixiou catching her round the waist.

“In the first place, my dear gentlemen, I have never, since I’ve been in the business, found man or woman to haggle over happiness. Besides,” she said, letting a cold smile flicker on her lips, and enforcing it by an icy glance full of catlike distrust, “if it doesn’t concern your happiness, it concerns your fortune; and at the height where I find you lodging no man haggles over a ‘dot’– Come,” she said, “out with it! What is it you want to know, my lambs?”

“About the Beunier family,” replied Bixiou, very glad to find out something in this indirect manner about persons in whom he was interested.

“Oh! as for that,” she said, “one louis is quite enough.”

“Why?”

“Because I hold all the mother’s jewels and she’s on tenter-hooks every three months, I can tell you! It is hard work for her to pay the interest on what I’ve lent her. Do you want to marry there, simpleton?” she added, addressing Gazonal; “then pay me forty francs and I’ll talk four hundred worth.”

Gazonal produced a forty-franc gold-piece, and Madame Nourrisson gave him startling details as to the secret penury of certain so-called fashionable women. This dealer in cast-off clothes, getting lively as she talked, pictured herself unconsciously while telling of others. Without betraying a single name or any secret, she made the three men shudder by proving to them how little so-called happiness existed in Paris that did not rest on the vacillating foundation of borrowed money. She possessed, laid away in her drawers, the secrets of departed grandmothers, living children, deceased husbands, dead granddaughters,–memories set in gold and diamonds. She learned appalling stories by making her clients talk of one another; tearing their secrets from them in moments of passion, of quarrels, of anger, and during those cooler negotiations which need a loan to settle difficulties.