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 been seized, except the clothes and the little jewelry that he was wearing. The three young men, provided with an excellent dinner, and whilst drinking the sherry brought by De Marsay, enquired into Savinien’s situation, apparently in order to organize his future, but doubtless in order to try him.

“When one is called Savinien de Portenduère,” cried Rastignac, “when one has a future peer of France for a cousin, and the Admiral de Kergarouët for a great-uncle, if one commits the huge mistake of allowing one’s self to be put in Sainte-Pélagie, one must not stay there, my dear fellow!”

“Why did you tell me nothing of all this?” cried De Marsay, “you had my traveling carriage, ten thousand francs and letters for Germany at your disposal. We know Gobseck, Gigonnet and other crocodiles, we would have made them come to terms. And in the first place, who was the ass who led you to drink at this deadly source?” asked De Marsay.

“Des Lupeaulx.”

The three young men looked at each other, thus exchanging the same thought, a suspicion, but without uttering it.

“Explain your resources to me, show me your hand?” asked De Marsay.

When Savinien had described his mother and her bow-trimmed caps, her little house with its three windows facing the Rue des Bourgeois, with no other garden than a yard with a well and a shed for storing the wood; when he had counted up the value of