She even took the precaution of closing the french window of the drawing-room, smiling as she did so at her daughter and cousin, whom she saw installed in an old summer-house at the far end of the garden. Returning, she left the door of the card-room ajar, so that she might hear the drawing-room door open if anyone should come in. Moving about the apartment, the Baroness, being unobserved, allowed her face to express what she was thinking, and anyone seeing her would have been quite alarmed by her agitation. But as she crossed the drawing-room to the card-room, she masked her face with that inscrutable reserve that all women, even the most candid, seem able to assume at will.

During these preparations, singular to say the least, the National Guardsman was examining the furnishings of the room in which he found himself. As he remarked the silk curtains, once red, but now faded to violet by the sun and frayed along the folds by long use, a carpet from which the colours had disappeared, chairs with their gilding rubbed off and their silk spotted with stains and worn threadbare in patches, his contemptuous expression was followed by satisfaction, and then by hope, in naïve succession on his successful-shopkeeper’s commonplace face. He was surveying himself in a glass above an old Empire clock, taking stock of himself, when the rustle of the Baroness’s silk dress warned him of her approach. He at once struck an attitude.

The Baroness sat down on a little sofa that must certainly have been very pretty about the year 1809, and motioned Crevel to an armchair decorated with bronzed sphinx heads, from which the paint was scaling off, leaving the bare wood exposed in places.

‘These precautions of yours, Madame, would be a delightfully promising sign for a…’

‘A lover,’ she interrupted him.

‘The word is weak,’ he said, placing his right hand on his heart, and rolling his eyes in a fashion that a woman nearly always finds comic when she meets them with no sympathy in her own. ‘A lover! A lover! Say rather – a man bewitched!’

‘Listen, Monsieur Crevel,’ the Baroness went on, too much in earnest to feel like laughing. ‘You are fifty – that’s ten years younger than Monsieur Hulot, I know; but if a woman is to commit follies at my age she has to have something to justify her: good looks, youth, celebrity, distinction, brilliant gifts to dazzle her to the point of making her oblivious of everything, even of her age. You may have an income of fifty thousand francs, but your age must be weighed in the balance against your fortune; and you have nothing that a woman needs.’

‘And love?’ said the Captain, rising and coming towards her. ‘A love that…’

‘No, Monsieur, infatuation!’ said the Baroness, interrupting him to try to put an end to this ridiculous scene.

‘Yes, infatuation and love,’ he went on, ‘but something more than that too, a right…’

‘A right!’ exclaimed Madame Hulot, suddenly impressive in her scorn, defiance, and indignation. ‘But if you go on in this strain, we shall never have done; and I did not ask you to come here to talk about something that has made you an unwelcome visitor in this house, in spite of the connexion between our two families.’

‘I thought you did.…’

‘What – again?’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you not see, Monsieur, by the detached and unconcerned way in which I speak of a lover and love and everything that is most indecorous on a woman’s lips, that I am perfectly certain of remaining virtuous? I am not afraid of anything, even of incurring suspicion by shutting myself in this room alone with you. Does a frail woman behave so? You know very well why I asked you to come!’

‘No, Madame,’ Crevel replied, with a sudden chill in his manner. He pursed his lips and struck his pose.

‘Well, I’ll be brief, and cut short the embarrassment this causes both of us,’ said the Baroness, looking him in the face.

Crevel made an ironic bow, in which a man of his trade would have recognized the affected courtesy of a one-time commercial traveller.

‘Our son has married your daughter…’

‘And if that were to do again!…’

‘The marriage would not take place,’ rejoined the Baroness, with spirit. ‘I have little doubt of it. All the same, you have no cause for complaint. My son is not only one of the leading lawyers in Paris, but a Deputy since last year, and he has made such a brilliant début in the Chamber that it seems likely that he will be in the Government before long. My son has been consulted twice in the drafting of important Bills, and if he wanted the post he could be Solicitor-General, representing the Government in the Court of Appeal, tomorrow. So that if you mean to imply that you have a son-in-law with no fortune…’

‘A son-in-law whom I am obliged to keep,’ returned Crevel; ‘which seems to me worse, Madame. Of the five hundred thousand francs settled on my daughter as her dowry, two hundred thousand have gone heaven knows where! In paying your fine son’s debts, in buying high-class furniture for his house, a house worth five hundred thousand francs that brings in barely fifteen thousand because he occupies the best part of it himself, and on which he still owes two hundred and sixty thousand francs – the rent from it barely covers the interest on the debt. This year I have had to give my daughter something like twenty thousand francs to enable her to make ends meet. And my son-in-law who, they say, was making thirty thousand francs in the law-courts is going to throw that up for the Chamber.…’

‘That, Monsieur Crevel, is a side issue, quite beside the point. But, to have done with it, if my son gets into office, if he has you made Officer of the Legion of Honour and Municipal Councillor of Paris, as a retired perfume-seller you will not have much to complain of.’

‘Ah! now we have it, Madame! I am a tradesman, a shopkeeper, a former retailer of almond paste, eau-de-Portugal, cephalic oil for hair troubles. I must consider myself highly honoured to have married my only daughter to the son of Monsieur le Baron Hulot d’Ervy. My daughter will be a Baroness. That’s Regency, that’s Louis XV, that belongs to the Oeil-de-Boeuf ante-room at Versailles! All very fine… I love Célestine as a man cannot help loving his only child. I love her so much that rather than give her brothers and sisters I have put up with all the inconveniences of being a widower in Paris – and in my prime, Madame! – but you may take it from me that although I may dote on my daughter I do not intend to make a hole in my capital for your son, whose expenses seem to an old businessman like myself to need some explanation.’

‘Monsieur, you see that Monsieur Popinot, who was once a druggist in the rue des Lombards, is Minister of Commerce now, at this very moment.…’

‘A friend of mine, Madame!’ said the ex-perfumer. ‘For I, Célestin Crevel, once head salesman to old César Birotteau, bought the business of the said Birotteau, Popinot’s father-in-law, Popinot being just an ordinary assistant in the business; and he himself reminds me of the fact, for he is not stuck-up – I’ll say that for him – with people in good positions, worth sixty thousand francs a year.’

‘Well, Monsieur, so the ideas that you describe as Regency are not in fashion now, in times when people accept a man on his personal merits; which is what you did when you married your daughter to my son.’

‘And you don’t know how that marriage came about!’ exclaimed Crevel. ‘Ah! confound this bachelor life! If it had not been for my libertine ways my Célestine would be the Vicomtesse Popinot today!’

‘But let me repeat, let’s have no recriminations over what is done!’ the Baroness said, with emphasis.