sergeant when some day you may be Duke of Dantzig and Marshal of
France. Now, see what a match du Tillet has made since then. He
married one of the Comte de Granville's daughters, into one of the
oldest families in the French magistracy."

"Desroches' mother had a friend, a druggist's wife," continued Bixiou.
"Said druggist had retired with a fat fortune. These druggist folk
have absurdly crude notions; by way of giving his daughter a good
education, he had sent her to a boarding-school! Well, Matifat meant
the girl to marry well, on the strength of two hundred thousand
francs, good hard coin with no scent of drugs about it."

"Florine's Matifat?" asked Blondet.

"Well, yes. Lousteau's Matifat; ours, in fact. The Matifats, even then
lost to us, had gone to live in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, as far as may
be from the Rue des Lombards, where their money was made. For my own
part, I had cultivated those Matifats. While I served my time in the
galleys of the law, when I was cooped up for eight hours out of the
twenty-four with nincompoops of the first water, I saw queer
characters enough to convince myself that all is not dead-level even
in obscure places, and that in the flattest inanity you may chance
upon an angle. Yes, dear boy, such and such a philistine is to such
another as Raphael is to Natoire.

"Mme. Desroches, the widowed mother, had long ago planned this
marriage for her son, in spite of a tremendous obstacle which took the
shape of one Cochin, Matifat's partner's son, a young clerk in the
adult department. M. and Mme. Matifat were of the opinion that an
attorney's position 'gave some guarantee for a wife's happiness,' to