resolving to sell all and let Madame de la Chanterie furnish the rooms
for him. He wanted a new life, and the very sight of these objects
would remind him of that which he wished to forget. In his desire for
transformation (for he belonged to those characters who spring at a
bound into the middle of a situation, instead of advancing, as others
do, step by step), he was seized while he breakfasted with an idea,
--he would turn his whole property into money, pay his debts, and
place the remainder of his capital in the banking-house with which his
father had done business.

This house was the firm of Mongenod and Company, established in 1816
or 1817, whose reputation for honesty and uprightness had never been
questioned in the midst of the commercial depravity which smirched,
more or less, all the banking-houses of Paris. In spite of their
immense wealth, the houses of Nucingen, du Tillet, the Keller
Brothers, Palma and Company, were each regarded, more or less, with
secret disrespect, although it is true this disrespect was only
whispered. Evil means had produced such fine results, such political
successes, dynastic principles covered so completely base workings,
that no one in 1834 thought of the mud in which the roots of these
fine trees, the mainstay of the State, were plunged. Nevertheless
there was not a single one of those great bankers to whom the
confidence expressed in the house of Mongenod was not a wound. Like
English houses, the Mongenods made no external display of luxury. They
lived in dignified stillness, satisfied to do their business
prudently, wisely, and with a stern uprightness which enabled them to
carry it from one end of the globe to the other.

The actual head of the house, Frederic Mongenod, is the brother-in-law
of the Vicomte de Fontaine; therefore, this numerous family is allied