meaning in the connection of these three persons,--Ida, Ferragus, and
Madame Jules; an occupation equivalent to that of trying to arrange
the many-cornered bits of a Chinese puzzle without possessing the key
to the game. But Madame Jules had seen him, Madame Jules went there,
Madame Jules had lied to him. Maulincour determined to go and see her
the next day. She could not refuse his visit, for he was now her
accomplice; he was hands and feet in the mysterious affair, and she
knew it. Already he felt himself a sultan, and thought of demanding
from Madame Jules, imperiously, all her secrets.

In those days Paris was seized with a building-fever. If Paris is a
monster, it is certainly a most mania-ridden monster. It becomes
enamored of a thousand fancies: sometimes it has a mania for building,
like a great seigneur who loves a trowel; soon it abandons the trowel
and becomes all military; it arrays itself from head to foot as a
national guard, and drills and smokes; suddenly, it abandons military
manoeuvres and flings away cigars; it is commercial, care-worn, falls
into bankruptcy, sells its furniture on the place de Chatelet, files
its schedule; but a few days later, lo! it has arranged its affairs
and is giving fetes and dances. One day it eats barley-sugar by the
mouthful, by the handful; yesterday it bought "papier Weymen"; to-day
the monster's teeth ache, and it applies to its walls an
alexipharmatic to mitigate their dampness; to-morrow it will lay in a
provision of pectoral paste. It has its manias for the month, for the
season, for the year, like its manias of a day.

So, at the moment of which we speak, all the world was building or
pulling down something,--people hardly knew what as yet. There were
very few streets in which high scaffoldings on long poles could not be
seen, fastened from floor to floor with transverse blocks inserted