Kitabı oku: «Parisians in the Country», sayfa 11

“Indispensable!” cried Dinah, looking curiously at the doctor. “Do you mean that you prescribe love to me?”

“If you go on living as you live now, in three years you will be hideous,” replied Bianchon in a dictatorial tone.

“Monsieur!” said Madame de la Baudraye, almost frightened.

“Forgive my friend,” said Lousteau, half jestingly. “He is always the medical man, and to him love is merely a question of hygiene. But he is quite disinterested – it is for your sake only that he speaks – as is evident, since he is starting in an hour – ”

At Cosne a little crowd gathered round the old repainted chaise, with the arms on the panels granted by Louis XIV. to the new La Baudraye. Gules, a pair of scales or; on a chief azure (color on color) three cross-crosslets argent. For supporters two greyhounds argent, collared azure, chained or. The ironical motto, Deo sic patet fides et hominibus, had been inflicted on the converted Calvinist by Hozier the satirical.

“Let us get out; they will come and find us,” said the Baroness, desiring her coachman to keep watch.

Dinah took Bianchon’s arm, and the doctor set off by the banks of the Loire at so rapid a pace that the journalist had to linger behind. The physician had explained by a single wink that he meant to do Lousteau a good turn.

“You have been attracted by Etienne,” said Bianchon to Dinah; “he has appealed strongly to your imagination; last night we were talking about you. – He loves you. But he is frivolous, and difficult to hold; his poverty compels him to live in Paris, while everything condemns you to live at Sancerre. – Take a lofty view of life. Make Lousteau your friend; do not ask too much of him; he will come three times a year to spend a few days with you, and you will owe to him your beauty, happiness, and fortune. Monsieur de la Baudraye may live to be a hundred; but he might die in a few days if he should leave off the flannel winding-sheet in which he swathes himself. So run no risks, be prudent both of you. – Say not a word – I have read your heart.”

Madame de la Baudraye was defenceless under this serried attack, and in the presence of a man who spoke at once as a doctor, a confessor, and confidential friend.

“Indeed!” said she. “Can you suppose that any woman would care to compete with a journalist’s mistresses? – Monsieur Lousteau strikes me as agreeable and witty; but he is blase, etc., etc. – ”

Dinah had turned back, and was obliged to check the flow of words by which she tried to disguise her intentions; for Etienne, who seemed to be studying progress in Cosne, was coming to meet them.

“Believe me,” said Bianchon, “what he wants is to be truly loved; and if he alters his course of life, it will be to the benefit of his talent.”

Dinah’s coachman hurried up breathlessly to say that the diligence had come in, and they walked on quickly, Madame de la Baudraye between the two men.

“Good-bye, my children!” said Bianchon, before they got into the town, “you have my blessing!”

He released Madame de la Baudraye’s hand from his arm, and allowed Lousteau to draw it into his, with a tender look, as he pressed it to his heart. What a difference to Dinah! Etienne’s arm thrilled her deeply. Bianchon’s had not stirred her in the least. She and the journalist exchanged one of those glowing looks that are more than an avowal.

“Only provincial women wear muslin gowns in these days,” thought Lousteau to himself, “the only stuff which shows every crease. This woman, who has chosen me for her lover, will make a fuss over her frock! If she had but put on a foulard skirt, I should be happy. – What is the meaning of these difficulties – ”

While Lousteau was wondering whether Dinah had put on a muslin gown on purpose to protect herself by an insuperable obstacle, Bianchon, with the help of the coachman, was seeing his luggage piled on the diligence. Finally, he came to take leave of Dinah, who was excessively friendly with him.

“Go home, Madame la Baronne, leave me here – Gatien will be coming,” he added in an undertone. “It is getting late,” said he aloud. “Good-bye!”

“Good-bye – great man!” cried Lousteau, shaking hands with Bianchon.

When the journalist and Madame de la Baudraye, side by side in the rickety old chaise, had recrossed the Loire, they both were unready to speak. In these circumstances, the first words that break the silence are full of terrible meaning.

“Do you know how much I love you?” said the journalist point blank.

Victory might gratify Lousteau, but defeat could cause him no grief. This indifference was the secret of his audacity. He took Madame de la Baudraye’s hand as he spoke these decisive words, and pressed it in both his; but Dinah gently released it.

“Yes, I am as good as an actress or a grisette,” she said in a voice that trembled, though she spoke lightly. “But can you suppose that a woman who, in spite of her absurdities, has some intelligence, will have reserved the best treasures of her heart for a man who will regard her merely as a transient pleasure? – I am not surprised to hear from your lips the words which so many men have said to me – but – ”

The coachman turned round.

“Here comes Monsieur Gatien,” said he.

“I love you, I will have you, you shall be mine, for I have never felt for any woman the passion I have for you!” said Lousteau in her ear.

“In spite of my will, perhaps?” said she, with a smile.

“At least you must seem to have been assaulted to save my honor,” said the Parisian, to whom the fatal immaculateness of clean muslin suggested a ridiculous notion.

Before Gatien had reached the end of the bridge, the outrageous journalist had crumpled up Madame de la Baudraye’s muslin dress to such an effect that she was absolutely not presentable.

“Oh, monsieur!” she exclaimed in dignified reproof.

“You defied me,” said the Parisian.

But Gatien now rode up with the vehemence of a duped lover. To regain a little of Madame de la Baudraye’s esteem, Lousteau did his best to hide the tumbled dress from Gatien’s eyes by leaning out of the chaise to speak to him from Dinah’s side.

“Go back to our inn,” said he, “there is still time; the diligence does not start for half an hour. The papers are on the table of the room Bianchon was in; he wants them particularly, for he will be lost without his notes for the lecture.”

“Pray go, Gatien,” said Dinah to her young adorer, with an imperious glance. And the boy thus commanded turned his horse and was off with a loose rein.

“Go quickly to La Baudraye,” cried Lousteau to the coachman. “Madame is not well – Your mother only will know the secret of my trick,” added he, taking his seat by Dinah.

“You call such infamous conduct a trick?” cried Madame de la Baudraye, swallowing down a few tears that dried up with the fire of outraged pride.

She leaned back in the corner of the chaise, crossed her arms, and gazed out at the Loire and the landscape, at anything rather than at Lousteau. The journalist put on his most ingratiating tone, and talked till they reached La Baudraye, where Dinah fled indoors, trying not to be seen by any one. In her agitation she threw herself on a sofa and burst into tears.

“If I am an object of horror to you, of aversion or scorn, I will go,” said Lousteau, who had followed her. And he threw himself at her feet.

It was at this crisis that Madame Piedefer came in, saying to her daughter:

“What is the matter? What has happened?”

“Give your daughter another dress at once,” said the audacious Parisian in the prim old lady’s ear.

Hearing the mad gallop of Gatien’s horse, Madame de la Baudraye fled to her bedroom, followed by her mother.

“There are no papers at the inn,” said Gatien to Lousteau, who went out to meet him.

“And you found none at the Chateau d’Anzy either?” replied Lousteau.

“You have been making a fool of me,” said Gatien, in a cold, set voice.

“Quite so,” replied Lousteau. “Madame de la Baudraye was greatly annoyed by your choosing to follow her without being invited. Believe me, to bore a woman is a bad way of courting her. Dinah has played you a trick, and you have given her a laugh; it is more than any of you has done in these thirteen years past. You owe that success to Bianchon, for your cousin was the author of the Farce of the ‘Manuscript.’ – Will the horse get over it?” asked Lousteau with a laugh, while Gatien was wondering whether to be angry or not.

“The horse!” said Gatien.

At this moment Madame de la Baudraye came in, dressed in a velvet gown, and accompanied by her mother, who shot angry flashes at Lousteau. It would have been too rash for Dinah to seem cold or severe to Lousteau in Gatien’s presence; and Etienne, taking advantage of this, offered his arm to the supposed Lucretia; however, she declined it.

“Do you mean to cast off a man who has vowed to live for you?” said he, walking close beside her. “I shall stop at Sancerre and go home to-morrow.”

“Are you coming, mamma?” said Madame de la Baudraye to Madame Piedefer, thus avoiding a reply to the direct challenge by which Lousteau was forcing her to a decision.

Lousteau handed the mother into the chaise, he helped Madame de la Baudraye by gently taking her arm, and he and Gatien took the front seat, leaving the saddle horse at La Baudraye.

“You have changed your gown,” said Gatien, blunderingly, to Dinah.

“Madame la Baronne was chilled by the cool air off the river,” replied Lousteau. “Bianchon advised her to put on a warm dress.”

Dinah turned as red as a poppy, and Madame Piedefer assumed a stern expression.

“Poor Bianchon! he is on the road to Paris. A noble soul!” said Lousteau.

“Oh, yes!” cried Madame de la Baudraye, “he is high-minded, full of delicate feeling – ”

“We were in such good spirits when we set out,” said Lousteau; “now you are overdone, and you speak to me so bitterly – why? Are you not accustomed to being told how handsome and how clever you are? For my part, I say boldly, before Gatien, I give up Paris; I mean to stay at Sancerre and swell the number of your cavalieri serventi. I feel so young again in my native district; I have quite forgotten Paris and all its wickedness, and its bores, and its wearisome pleasures. – Yes, my life seems in a way purified.”

Dinah allowed Lousteau to talk without even looking at him; but at last there was a moment when this serpent’s rhodomontade was really so inspired by the effort he made to affect passion in phrases and ideas of which the meaning, though hidden from Gatien, found a loud response in Dinah’s heart, that she raised her eyes to his. This look seemed to crown Lousteau’s joy; his wit flowed more freely, and at last he made Madame de la Baudraye laugh. When, under circumstances which so seriously compromise her pride, a woman has been made to laugh, she is finally committed.

As they drove in by the spacious graveled forecourt, with its lawn in the middle, and the large vases filled with flowers which so well set off the facade of Anzy, the journalist was saying:

“When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything – not even our virtues. – Do you forgive me,” he added in Madame de la Baudraye’s ear, and pressing her arm to his heart with tender emphasis. And Dinah could not help smiling.

All through dinner, and for the rest of the evening, Etienne was in the most delightful spirits, inexhaustibly cheerful; but while thus giving vent to his intoxication, he now and then fell into the dreamy abstraction of a man who seems rapt in his own happiness.

After coffee had been served, Madame de la Baudraye and her mother left the men to wander about the gardens. Monsieur Gravier then remarked to Monsieur de Clagny:

“Did you observe that Madame de la Baudraye, after going out in a muslin gown came home in a velvet?”

“As she got into the carriage at Cosne, the muslin dress caught on a brass nail and was torn all the way down,” replied Lousteau.

“Oh!” exclaimed Gatien, stricken to the heart by hearing two such different explanations.

The journalist, who understood, took Gatien by the arm and pressed it as a hint to him to be silent. A few minutes later Etienne left Dinah’s three adorers and took possession of little La Baudraye. Then Gatien was cross-questioned as to the events of the day. Monsieur Gravier and Monsieur de Clagny were dismayed to hear that on the return from Cosne Lousteau had been alone with Dinah, and even more so on hearing the two versions explaining the lady’s change of dress. And the three discomfited gentlemen were in a very awkward position for the rest of the evening.

Next day each, on various business, was obliged to leave Anzy; Dinah remained with her mother, Lousteau, and her husband. The annoyance vented by the three victims gave rise to an organized rebellion in Sancerre. The surrender of the Muse of Le Berry, of the Nivernais, and of Morvan was the cause of a perfect hue and cry of slander, evil report, and various guesses in which the story of the muslin gown held a prominent place. No dress Dinah had ever worn had been so much commented on, or was half as interesting to the girls, who could not conceive what the connection might be, that made the married women laugh, between love and a muslin gown.

The Presidente Boirouge, furious at her son’s discomfiture, forgot the praise she had lavished on the poem of Paquita, and fulminated terrific condemnation on the woman who could publish such a disgraceful work.

“The wretched woman commits every crime she writes about,” said she. “Perhaps she will come to the same end as her heroine!”

Dinah’s fate among the good folks of Sancerre was like that of Marechal Soult in the opposition newspapers; as long as he is minister he lost the battle of Toulouse; whenever he is out of the Government he won it! While she was virtuous, Dinah was a match for Camille de Maupin, a rival of the most famous women; but as soon as she was happy, she was an unhappy creature.

Monsieur de Clagny was her valiant champion; he went several times to the Chateau d’Anzy to acquire the right to contradict the rumors current as to the woman he still faithfully adored, even in her fall; and he maintained that she and Lousteau were engaged together on some great work. But the lawyer was laughed to scorn.

The month of October was lovely; autumn is the finest season in the valley of the Loire; but in 1836 it was unusually glorious. Nature seemed to aid and abet Dinah, who, as Bianchon had predicted, gradually developed a heart-felt passion. In one month she was an altered woman. She was surprised to find in herself so many inert and dormant qualities, hitherto in abeyance. To her Lousteau seemed an angel; for heart-love, the crowning need of a great nature, had made a new woman of her. Dinah was alive! She had found an outlet for her powers, she saw undreamed-of vistas in the future – in short, she was happy, happy without alarms or hindrances. The vast castle, the gardens, the park, the forest, favored love.

Lousteau found in Madame de la Baudraye an artlessness, nay, if you will, an innocence of mind which made her very original; there was much more of the unexpected and winning in her than in a girl. Lousteau was quite alive to a form of flattery which in most women is assumed, but which in Dinah was genuine; she really learned from him the ways of love; he really was the first to reign in her heart. And, indeed, he took the trouble to be exceedingly amiable.

Men, like women, have a stock in hand of recitatives, of cantabile, of nocturnes, airs and refrains – shall we say of recipes, although we speak of love – which each one believes to be exclusively his own. Men who have reached Lousteau’s age try to distribute the “movements” of this repertoire through the whole opera of a passion. Lousteau, regarding this adventure with Dinah as a mere temporary connection, was eager to stamp himself on her memory in indelible lines; and during that beautiful October he was prodigal of his most entrancing melodies and most elaborate barcarolles. In fact, he exhausted every resource of the stage management of love, to use an expression borrowed from the theatrical dictionary, and admirably descriptive of his manoeuvres.

“If that woman ever forgets me!” he would sometimes say to himself as they returned together from a long walk in the woods, “I will owe her no grudge – she will have found something better.”

When two beings have sung together all the duets of that enchanting score, and still love each other, it may be said that they love truly.

Lousteau, however, had not time to repeat himself, for he was to leave Anzy in the early days of November. His paper required his presence in Paris. Before breakfast, on the day before he was to leave, the journalist and Dinah saw the master of the house come in with an artist from Nevers, who restored carvings of all kinds.

“What are you going to do?” asked Lousteau. “What is to be done to the chateau?”

“This is what I am going to do,” said the little man, leading Lousteau, the local artist, and Dinah out on the terrace.

He pointed out, on the front of the building, a shield supported by two sirens, not unlike that which may be seen on the arcade, now closed, through which there used to be a passage from the Quai des Tuileries to the courtyard of the old Louvre, and over which the words may still be seen, “Bibliotheque du Cabinet du Roi.” This shield bore the arms of the noble House of Uxelles, namely, Or and gules party per fess, with two lions or, dexter and sinister as supporters. Above, a knight’s helm, mantled of the tincture of the shield, and surmounted by a ducal coronet. Motto, Cy paroist! A proud and sonorous device.

“I want to put my own coat of arms in the place of that of the Uxelles; and as they are repeated six times on the two fronts and the two wings, it is not a trifling affair.”

“Your arms, so new, and since 1830!” exclaimed Dinah.

“Have I not created an entail?”

“I could understand it if you had children,” said the journalist.

“Oh!” said the old man, “Madame de la Baudraye is still young; there is no time lost.”

This allusion made Lousteau smile; he did not understand Monsieur de la Baudraye.

“There, Didine!” said he in Dinah’s ear, “what a waste of remorse!”

Dinah begged him to give her one day more, and the lovers parted after the manner of certain theatres, which give ten last performances of a piece that is paying. And how many promises they made! How many solemn pledges did not Dinah exact and the unblushing journalist give her!

Dinah, with superiority of the Superior Woman, accompanied Lousteau, in the face of all the world, as far as Cosne, with her mother and little La Baudraye. When, ten days later, Madame de la Baudraye saw in her drawing-room at La Baudraye, Monsieur de Clagny, Gatien, and Gravier, she found an opportunity of saying to each in turn:

“I owe it to Monsieur Lousteau that I discovered that I had not been loved for my own sake.”

And what noble speeches she uttered, on man, on the nature of his feelings, on the end of his base passions, and so forth. Of Dinah’s three worshipers, Monsieur de Clagny only said to her: “I love you, come what may” – and Dinah accepted him as her confidant, lavished on him all the marks of friendship which women can devise for the Gurths who are ready thus to wear the collar of gilded slavery.

In Paris once more, Lousteau had, in a few weeks, lost the impression of the happy time he had spent at the Chateau d’Anzy. This is why: Lousteau lived by his pen.

In this century, especially since the triumph of the bourgeoisie– the commonplace, money-saving citizen – who takes good care not to imitate Francis I. or Louis XIV. – to live by the pen is a form of penal servitude to which a galley-slave would prefer death. To live by the pen means to create – to create to-day, and to-morrow, and incessantly – or to seem to create; and the imitation costs as dear as the reality. So, besides his daily contribution to a newspaper, which was like the stone of Sisyphus, and which came every Monday, crashing down on to the feather of his pen, Etienne worked for three or four literary magazines. Still, do not be alarmed; he put no artistic conscientiousness into his work. This man of Sancerre had a facility, a carelessness, if you call it so, which ranked him with those writers who are mere scriveners, literary hacks. In Paris, in our day, hack-work cuts a man off from every pretension to a literary position. When he can do no more, or no longer cares for advancement, the man who can write becomes a journalist and a hack.

The life he leads is not unpleasing. Blue-stockings, beginners in every walk of life, actresses at the outset or the close of a career, publishers and authors, all make much of these writers of the ready pen. Lousteau, a thorough man about town, lived at scarcely any expense beyond paying his rent. He had boxes at all the theatres; the sale of the books he reviewed or left unreviewed paid for his gloves; and he would say to those authors who published at their own expense, “I have your book always in my hands!” He took toll from vanity in the form of drawings or pictures. Every day had its engagements to dinner, every night its theatre, every morning was filled up with callers, visits, and lounging. His serial in the paper, two novels a year for weekly magazines, and his miscellaneous articles were the tax he paid for this easy-going life. And yet, to reach this position, Etienne had struggled for ten years.

At the present time, known to the literary world, liked for the good or the mischief he did with equally facile good humor, he let himself float with the stream, never caring for the future. He ruled a little set of newcomers, he had friendships – or rather, habits of fifteen years’ standing, and men with whom he supped, and dined, and indulged his wit. He earned from seven to eight hundred francs a month, a sum which he found quite insufficient for the prodigality peculiar to the impecunious. Indeed, Lousteau found himself now just as hard up as when, on first appearing in Paris, he had said to himself, “If I had but five hundred francs a month, I should be rich!”

The cause of this phenomenon was as follows: Lousteau lived in the Rue des Martyrs in pretty ground-floor rooms with a garden, and splendidly furnished. When he settled there in 1833 he had come to an agreement with an upholsterer that kept his pocket money low for a long time. These rooms were let for twelve hundred francs. The months of January, April, July, and October were, as he phrased it, his indigent months. The rent and the porter’s account cleaned him out. Lousteau took no fewer hackney cabs, spend a hundred francs in breakfasts all the same, smoked thirty francs’ worth of cigars, and could never refuse the mistress of a day a dinner or a new dress. He thus dipped so deeply into the fluctuating earnings of the following months, that he could no more find a hundred francs on his chimney-piece now, when he was making seven or eight hundred francs a month, than he could in 1822, when he was hardly getting two hundred.

Tired, sometimes, by the incessant vicissitudes of a literary life, and as much bored by amusement as a courtesan, Lousteau would get out of the tideway and sit on the bank, and say to one and another of his intimate allies – Nathan or Bixiou, as they sat smoking in his scrap of garden, looking out on an evergreen lawn as big as a dinner-table:

“What will be the end of us? White hairs are giving us respectful hints!”

“Lord! we shall marry when we choose to give as much thought to the matter as we give to a drama or a novel,” said Nathan.

“And Florine?” retorted Bixiou.

“Oh, we all have a Florine,” said Etienne, flinging away the end of his cigar and thinking of Madame Schontz.

Madame Schontz was a pretty enough woman to put a very high price on the interest on her beauty, while reserving absolute ownership for Lousteau, the man of her heart. Like all those women who get the name in Paris of Lorettes, from the Church of Notre Dame de Lorette, round about which they dwell, she lived in the Rue Flechier, a stone’s throw from Lousteau. This lady took a pride and delight in teasing her friends by boasting of having a Wit for her lover.

These details of Lousteau’s life and fortune are indispensable, for this penury and this bohemian existence of a man to whom Parisian luxury had become a necessity, were fated to have a cruel influence on Dinah’s life. Those to whom the bohemia of Paris is familiar will now understand how it was that, by the end of a fortnight, the journalist, up to his ears in the literary environment, could laugh about his Baroness with his friends and even with Madame Schontz. To such readers as regard such things as utterly mean, it is almost useless to make excuses which they will not accept.

“What did you do at Sancerre?” asked Bixiou the first time he met Lousteau.

“I did good service to three worthy provincials – a Receiver-General of Taxes, a little cousin of his, and a Public Prosecutor, who for ten years had been dancing round and round one of the hundred ‘Tenth Muses’ who adorn the Departments,” said he. “But they had no more dared to touch her than we touch a decorated cream at dessert till some strong-minded person has made a hole in it.”

“Poor boy!” said Bixiou. “I said you had gone to Sancerre to turn Pegasus out to grass.”

“Your joke is as stupid as my Muse is handsome,” retorted Lousteau. “Ask Bianchon, my dear fellow.”

“A Muse and a Poet! A homoeopathic cure then!” said Bixiou.

On the tenth day Lousteau received a letter with the Sancerre post-mark.

“Good! very good!” said Lousteau.

“‘Beloved friend, idol of my heart and soul – ’ twenty pages of it! all at one sitting, and dated midnight! She writes when she finds herself alone. Poor woman! Ah, ha! And a postscript —

“‘I dare not ask you to write to me as I write, every day; still, I hope to have a few lines from my dear one every week, to relieve my mind.’ – What a pity to burn it all! it is really well written,” said Lousteau to himself, as he threw the ten sheets of paper into the fire after having read them. “That woman was born to reel off copy!”

Lousteau was not much afraid of Madame Schontz, who really loved him for himself, but he had supplanted a friend in the heart of a Marquise. This Marquise, a lady nowise coy, sometimes dropped in unexpectedly at his rooms in the evening, arriving veiled in a hackney coach; and she, as a literary woman, allowed herself to hunt through all his drawers.

A week later, Lousteau, who hardly remembered Dinah, was startled by another budget from Sancerre – eight leaves, sixteen pages! He heard a woman’s step; he thought it announced a search from the Marquise, and tossed these rapturous and entrancing proofs of affections into the fire – unread!

“A woman’s letter!” exclaimed Madame Schontz, as she came in. “The paper, the wax, are scented – ”

“Here you are, sir,” said a porter from the coach office, setting down two huge hampers in the ante-room. “Carriage paid. Please to sign my book.”

“Carriage paid!” cried Madame Schontz. “It must have come from Sancerre.”

“Yes, madame,” said the porter.

“Your Tenth Muse is a remarkably intelligent woman,” said the courtesan, opening one of the hampers, while Lousteau was writing his name. “I like a Muse who understands housekeeping, and who can make game pies as well as blots. And, oh! what beautiful flowers!” she went on, opening the second hamper. “Why, you could get none finer in Paris! – And here, and here! A hare, partridges, half a roebuck! – We will ask your friends and have a famous dinner, for Athalie has a special talent for dressing venison.”

Lousteau wrote to Dinah; but instead of writing from the heart, he was clever. The letter was all the more insidious; it was like one of Mirabeau’s letters to Sophie. The style of a true lover is transparent. It is a clear stream which allows the bottom of the heart to be seen between two banks, bright with the trifles of existence, and covered with the flowers of the soul that blossom afresh every day, full of intoxicating beauty – but only for two beings. As soon as a love letter has any charm for a third reader, it is beyond doubt the product of the head, not of the heart. But a woman will always be beguiled; she always believes herself to be the determining cause of this flow of wit.

By the end of December Lousteau had ceased to read Dinah’s letters; they lay in a heap in a drawer of his chest that was never locked, under his shirts, which they scented.

Then one of those chances came to Lousteau which such bohemians ought to clutch by every hair. In the middle of December, Madame Schontz, who took a real interest in Etienne, sent to beg him to call on her one morning on business.

“My dear fellow, you have a chance of marrying.”

“I can marry very often, happily, my dear.”

“When I say marrying, I mean marrying well. You have no prejudices: I need not mince matters. This is the position: A young lady has got into trouble; her mother knows nothing of even a kiss. Her father is an honest notary, a man of honor; he has been wise enough to keep it dark. He wants to get his daughter married within a fortnight, and he will give her a fortune of a hundred and fifty thousand francs – for he has three other children; but – and it is not a bad idea – he will add a hundred thousand francs, under the rose, hand to hand, to cover the damages. They are an old family of Paris citizens, Rue des Lombards – ”

“Well, then, why does not the lover marry her?”

“Dead.”

“What a romance! Such things are nowhere to be heard of but in the Rue des Lombards.”

“But do not take it into your head that a jealous brother murdered the seducer. The young man died in the most commonplace way of a pleurisy caught as he came out of the theatre. A head-clerk and penniless, the man entrapped the daughter in order to marry into the business – A judgment from heaven, I call it!”

“Where did you hear the story?”

“From Malaga; the notary is her milord.”