When Larsonneau arrived, there were still only five or six women in Mlle d’Aurigny’s large white-and-gold drawing room—women who took him by the hands and threw their arms around his neck in a frenzy of affection. They called him “Big Lar,” using the affectionate nickname that Laure had coined for him. And he, in piping tones, replied, “Be careful now, my little kittens, or you’ll crush my hat.”

This calmed them down, and they then crowded around him while he sat on a love seat and regaled them with a tale of Sylvia’s indigestion after their supper together the previous evening. Afterwards he took a box of candy from the pocket of his coat and offered them pralines. At this point, however, Laure emerged from her bedroom and, seeing that a number of gentlemen guests were arriving, led him off to a boudoir at one end of the salon, from which they were separated by two sets of curtains.

“Do you have the money?” she asked when they were alone.

On important occasions she used the familiar tu with him. Larsonneau, without answering, bowed obligingly and tapped the inside pocket of his coat.

“Oh, Big Lar!” the delighted young woman murmured.

She took him by the waist and kissed him.

“Wait,” she said, “Let’s get the cash and the papers out of the way. . . . Rozan is in my room. I’ll go get him.”

But he held her back, and now it was his turn to kiss her shoulders. “You remember the favor I asked of you?”

“Why yes, of course, silly! It’s agreed.”

She returned with Rozan in tow. Larsonneau was dressed more punctiliously than the duke, with better gloves and a more artful bow to his cravat. They casually touched hands and talked about the races two days earlier, in which a friend of theirs had entered a losing horse. Laure waited impatiently.

“Come, my darling, never mind all that,” she said to Rozan. “Big Lar has the money, you know. It’s time to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.”

Larsonneau made a show of remembering. “Oh, yes, quite right, I’ve got the money. . . . But you should have listened to me, old man! Would you believe that those scoundrels insisted on fifty percent? . . . I finally gave in, you know, because you said it made no difference to you.”

Laure d’Aurigny had obtained some official stamped paper earlier in the day. But when the moment came to find pen and ink, she looked at the two men with a perplexed expression, uncertain whether she had any in the house. She was about to go to the kitchen to look when Larsonneau took from his pocket—the same pocket that contained the box of candy—two marvels: a silver penholder with a tip that could be screwed out and a steel-and-ebony inkwell as exquisite and elegant as a jewel.

Rozan sat down to write. “Make the notes out in my name,” Larsonneau said. “I don’t want to compromise you, you see. We’ll work something out together. . . . Six notes of 25,000 francs each, is it not?”

Laure counted out the bills on a corner of the table. Rozan never saw them. By the time he looked up after signing his name, they had vanished into the young woman’s pocket. But she went over to him and kissed him on both cheeks, which seemed to please him no end. Larsonneau looked at them philosophically as he folded the notes and put the inkstand and pen back into his pocket.

The young woman still had her arms around Rozan’s neck when Aristide Saccard lifted one corner of the door curtain. “Don’t mind me,” he said, laughing.

The duke blushed, but Laure went over to shake the financier’s hand, giving him a conspiratorial wink. She was radiant.

“It’s done, my dear,” she said. “I warned you. You won’t be too angry with me, will you?”

Saccard shrugged good-naturedly. He pulled back the door curtain and stood aside to let Laure and the duke pass. Then, like an usher announcing the arrival of guests, he barked out, “Monsieur le duc, Madame la duchesse!”

This pleasantry proved a tremendous success. The next day it was mentioned in the newspapers, blatantly naming Laure d’Aurigny while identifying the two gentlemen only by initials so transparent that they concealed the secret from no one. The breaking off of the relationship between Aristide Saccard and fat Laure caused even more of a stir than their alleged affair.

Meanwhile, Saccard had allowed the door curtain to fall back into place, shutting out the burst of laughter that his jest had unleashed in the drawing room.

“What a good girl she is!” he said, turning now to face Larsonneau. “And such a slut! . . . And you, you rascal! What are you getting out of all this? How much are they giving you?”

But Larsonneau defended himself with smiles and pulled down his cuffs, which had gotten pushed up. Eventually he went and sat down next to the door on a love seat that Saccard had indicated to him with a motion of his hand.

“Come here, damn it, I won’t insist on hearing your confession. . . . Let’s get down to brass tacks, my friend. I had a very long conversation with my wife earlier this evening. . . . Everything is taken care of.”

“She agreed to sell her share?” Larsonneau quizzed him.

“Yes, but it wasn’t easy. . . . Women can be so stubborn. You see, my wife had promised an elderly aunt of hers that she wouldn’t sell. She had no end of scruples about it. . . . Fortunately I was ready with a story that quite made up her mind.”

He got up to light a cigar on the candelabra that Laure had left on the table and then returned to stretch out casually at one end of the love seat.

“I told my wife that you were completely ruined,” he went on. “That you’d gambled on the Bourse, squandered your money on whores, and gotten mixed up in shady speculations. And finally, that you were about to go bust in the most awful fashion. . . . I even insinuated that I had doubts about your honesty. . . . I then explained to her that the Charonne business was going to be tangled up in your collapse and that the best thing to do would be to accept your proposition to buy her out—for a pittance, to be sure.”

“That wasn’t very intelligent,” the expropriation agent murmured. “You really think your wife is going to believe such a tall tale?”

Saccard smiled. He was in an expansive mood.

“How naïve you are, my dear fellow,” he continued. “The substance of the story is of no account. It’s all in the details, the gestures, and the accent. Call Rozan in here and I’ll bet I can convince him that it’s broad daylight outside. And my wife isn’t much smarter than Rozan. . . . I let her peer into the abyss. She has no inkling that expropriation is imminent. Since she was surprised that in the middle of such a catastrophe you would be willing to take on a still heavier burden, I told her that she was probably getting in the way of some trick you were about to play on your creditors. . . . In the end, I advised her to sell as the only way to avoid getting mixed up in interminable law-suits and to get some money out of her land.”

Larsonneau still thought the story somewhat crude. He preferred less dramatic methods. Each of his operations was plotted and brought to a resolution with the elegance of a drawing-room comedy.

“In your place I would have come up with something else,” he said. “But then each of us has his own system. . . . In any case, all that remains now is to pay the piper.”

“That’s precisely what I wanted to settle with you,” Saccard replied. “Tomorrow, I will give my wife the purchase-and-sale agreement, and in exchange for returning the signed papers to you, the amount agreed upon should be remitted to her. . . . I prefer to avoid any discussion between you.”

In fact, he had never cared to allow Larsonneau into his home on a footing of intimacy. He never invited him and had accompanied him to Renée’s apartment on days when it was essential that the two partners meet in person. There had been three such occasions. Most of the time he had made use of his wife’s power of attorney on the assumption that there was no point in letting her get too close a look at what he was up to.