La Bourse is a brief, touching tale that contrasts with the dark dramas of the cycle. The young painter Hippolyte Schinner, talented and poor, takes a fall in his studio; helped up, he discovers his neighbors — a modest, charming young woman, Adélaïde Leseigneur, and her mother, the Baronne de Rouville, living in dignified, discreet straits. Hippolyte falls in love with Adélaïde and frequents the little household, where a few old soldiers are received for games of cards. One evening, after a visit, the painter finds his purse missing; suspicion grazes him, and with it the dreadful doubt that these needy women might have robbed him. This suspicion briefly poisons his love. But the explanation reverses the shame: the two women, having noticed that his purse was worn and nearly empty, had quietly replaced it with a new one that Adélaïde had embroidered herself — a gesture of delicacy and love that Hippolyte had almost taken for theft. The misunderstanding dispelled, love triumphs, and the story ends on the promise of happiness. Balzac paints, with rare gentleness, noble poverty that preserves its dignity, and the ease with which social prejudice assumes the worst of the dispossessed. The tale is valuable for its tenderness, for the fineness of its observation of modest interiors, and for the moral that emerges: the generosity of the humble confounds the distrust of the better-off. Brighter and more optimistic than most of the Scenes of Private Life, La Bourse recalls that Balzac's sensibility could also turn idyllic, and that feeling, in his work, is not always condemned to catastrophe.