“If you were to marry a lamb without spot, it might be a light woman by the end of two years. What is the damage?—an anticipated dividend! It is quite the fashion.
“Take my word for it, you can do no better than come to dine with Malaga tomorrow. You will meet your father-in-law; he will know the secret has been let out—by Malaga, with whom he cannot be angry—and then you are master of the situation. As to your wife!—Why her misconduct leaves you as free as a bachelor—”
“Your language is as blunt as a cannon ball.”
“I love you for your own sake, that is all—and I can reason. Well! why do you stand there like a wax image of Abd-el-Kader? There is nothing to meditate over. Marriage is heads or tails—well, you have tossed heads up.”
“You shall have my reply tomorrow,” said Lousteau.
“I would sooner have it at once; Malaga will write you up tonight.”
“Well, then, yes.”
Lousteau spent the evening in writing a long letter to the Marquise, giving her the reasons which compelled him to marry; his constant poverty, the torpor of his imagination, his white hairs, his moral and physical exhaustion—in short, four pages of arguments.—“As to Dinah, I will send her a circular announcing the marriage,” said he to himself. “As Bixiou says, I have not my match for knowing how to dock the tail of a passion.”
Lousteau, who at first had been on some ceremony with himself, by next day had come to the point of dreading lest the marriage should not come off. He was pressingly civil to the notary.
“I knew monsieur your father,” said he, “at Florentine’s, so I may well know you here, at Mademoiselle Turquet’s. Like father, like son. A very good fellow and a philosopher, was little Daddy Cardot—excuse me, we always called him so. At that time, Florine, Florentine, Tullia, Coralie, and Mariette were the five fingers of your hand, so to speak—it is fifteen years ago. My follies, as you may suppose, are a thing of the past.—In those days it was pleasure that ran away with me; now I am ambitious; but, in our day, to get on at all a man must be free from debt, have a good income, a wife, and a family. If I pay taxes enough to qualify me, I may be a deputy yet, like any other man.”
Maître Cardot appreciated this profession of faith. Lousteau had laid himself out to please and the notary liked him, feeling himself more at his ease, as may be easily imagined, with a man who had known his father’s secrets than he would have been with another. On the following day Lousteau was introduced to the Cardot family as the purchaser of the house in the Rue Saint-Lazare, and three days later he dined there.
Cardot lived in an old house near the Place du Châtelet. In this house everything was “good.” Economy covered every scrap of gilding with green gauze; all the furniture wore holland covers. Though it was impossible to feel a shade of uneasiness as to the wealth of the inhabitants, at the end of half an hour no one could suppress a yawn. Boredom perched in every nook; the curtains hung dolefully; the dining-room was like Harpagon’s. Even if Lousteau had not known all about Malaga, he could have guessed that the notary’s real life was spent elsewhere.
The journalist saw a tall, fair girl with blue eyes, at once shy and languishing. The elder brother took a fancy to him; he was the fourth clerk in the office, but strongly attracted by the snares of literary fame, though destined to succeed his father. The younger sister was twelve years old. Lousteau, assuming a little Jesuitical air, played the Monarchist and Churchman for the benefit of the mother, was quite smooth, deliberate, and complimentary.
Within three weeks of their introduction, at his fourth dinner there, Félicie Cardot, who had been watching Lousteau out of the corner of her eye, carried him a cup of coffee where he stood in the window recess, and said in a low voice, with tears in her eyes:
“I will devote my whole life, monsieur, to thanking you for your sacrifice in favor of a poor girl—”
Lousteau was touched; there was so much expression in her look, her accent, her attitude. “She would make a good man happy,” thought he, pressing her hand in reply.
Madame Cardot looked upon her son-in-law as a man with a future before him; but, above all the fine qualities she ascribed to him, she was most delighted by his high tone of morals. Étienne, prompted by the wily notary, had pledged his word that he had no natural children, no tie that could endanger the happiness of her dear Félicie.
“You may perhaps think I go rather too far,” said the bigot to the journalist; “but in giving such a jewel as my Félicie to any man, one must think of the future. I am not one of those mothers who want to be rid of their daughters. Monsieur Cardot hurries matters on, urges forward his daughter’s marriage; he wishes it over. This is the only point on which we differ.—Though with a man like you, monsieur, a literary man whose youth has been preserved by hard work from the moral shipwreck now so prevalent, we may feel quite safe;
