Thirty-two years of honourable life, of a wife’s loyalty, are not to be razed by the assaults of Monsieur Crevel!’

‘Retired perfumer, successor to César Birotteau at the Queen of Roses, rue Saint-Honoré’, said Crevel ironically. ‘Former Deputy Mayor, Captain of the National Guard, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, exactly like my predecessor.’

‘Monsieur,’ the Baroness continued, ‘Monsieur Hulot, after twenty years of fidelity, may have grown tired of his wife – that concerns me, and only me; but you see, Monsieur, that he has preserved some reticence regarding his infidelity, for I did not know that he had succeeded you in Mademoiselle Josépha’s heart.’

‘Oh! at a price, Madame I That song-bird has cost him more than a hundred thousand francs in the last two years. Ah! you haven’t reached the end of trouble yet.’

‘We need not prolong this discussion further, Monsieur Crevel. I do not intend to give up, for your sake, the happiness that a mother feels when she is able to embrace her children with a heart uncankered by remorse, and knows that she is respected and loved by her children. I mean to give my soul back to God unstained.’

‘Amen!’ said Crevel, his face distorted by the diabolical bitterness of aspirants of his kind who have failed after a renewed attempt to gain their ends. ‘You don’t know what extreme poverty is like – the shame, the disgrace.… I have tried to open your eyes. I wanted to save you, you and your daughter too! So be it! You shall spell out a modern parable of the prodigal father from the first letter to the last. Your tears and your pride affect my feelings, for to see a woman one loves cry is dreadful!’ Crevel went on, sitting down. ‘All I can promise you, dear Adeline, is to do nothing to injure you, or your husband; but never send anyone to me to make inquiries. That’s all!’

‘Oh, what shall I do?’ cried Madame Hulot.

Until this moment the Baroness had held out bravely under the three-fold torture that the interview’s plain speaking inflicted upon her heart, for she was suffering as a woman, a mother, and a wife. As a matter of fact, so long as her son’s father-in-law had shown himself overbearing and aggressive, she had found strength in the very opposition of her resistance to the shopkeeper’s brutality; but the good nature he evinced in the midst of his exasperation as a rebuffed lover and a handsome Captain of the National Guard turned down released the tension of nerves that had been strained to breaking point. She wrung her hands, dissolved into tears, and was in such a state of dazed exhaustion that she let Crevel, on his knees again, kiss her hands.

‘Oh God! where am I to turn?’ she went on, wiping her eyes. ‘Can a mother see her daughter pine before her eyes and look on calmly? What is to become of this being so splendidly endowed, by her own fine character and by its nurture, too, in her pure sheltered upbringing at her mother’s side? There are days when she wanders sadly in the garden, not knowing why. I find her with tears in her eyes.’

‘She is twenty-one,’ said Crevel.

‘Ought I to send her to a convent?’ said the Baroness. ‘At such times of crisis religion is often powerless against nature, and the most piously brought up girls lose their heads! But do get up, Monsieur. Do you not see that everything is finished between us now, that you are hateful to me, that you have struck down a mother’s last hope?’

‘And suppose I were to raise it again?’ he said.

Madame Hulot stared at Crevel with a frenzied look that touched him; but he crushed the pity in his heart, because of those words ‘you are hateful to me’. Virtue is always a little too much of a piece. It has no knowledge of the shades between black and white, or of the compromises possible between different human temperaments, by means of which a way may be manoeuvred out of a false position.

‘A girl as beautiful as Mademoiselle Hortense is not married off in these days without a dowry,’ Crevel observed, assuming his stiff attitude again. ‘Your daughter’s beauty is of the kind that scares husbands off; she’s like a thoroughbred horse, which needs too much care and money spent on it to attract many purchasers. Just try walking along with a woman like that on your arm! Everybody will stare at you, and follow you, and covet your wife. That sort of success makes lots of men uncomfortable because they don’t want to have to kill lovers; for, after all, one never kills more than one. In the position you’re in, you can choose one of only three ways to marry your daughter: with my help – but you won’t have it – that’s one; by finding an old man of sixty: very rich, childless, and wanting children – difficult, but they do exist. There are so many old men who take Joséphas or Jenny Cadines that surely you might come across one ready to make that sort of fool of himself with the blessing of the law – if I did not have my Célestine, and our two grandchildren, I would marry Hortense myself. That’s two! The third way is the easiest…’

Madame Hulot raised her head, and gazed anxiously at the retired perfumer.

‘Paris is a meeting-place, swarming with talent, for all the forceful vigorous young men who spring up like wild seedlings in French soil. They haven’t a roof over their heads, but they’re equal to anything, and set on making their fortune. Your humble servant was just such a young man in his time, and I have known some others! Twenty years ago du Tillet had nothing, and Popinot not much more. They were plodding along, both of them, in old Birotteau’s shop, with their minds made up to get on; and, as I see it, that determination was worth more to them than gold. You can run through money, but you don’t reach the bottom of the stuff you’re made of i All I had was determination to get on, and spunk.… And now you see du Tillet rubbing shoulders with all the nobs. Little Popinot became the richest druggist in the rue des Lombards, rose to be a Deputy, and there he is, in office, a Minister! Well, one of these condottieri, as they call them – freebooters of finance, the pen, or the artist’s brush – is the only hope you have in Paris of marrying a beautiful girl without a sou, because they are game enough for anything. Monsieur Popinot married Mademoiselle Birotteau when she hadn’t a penny.