“Eh, what! Where are you going?” du Bousquier cried uneasily.—“A fine thing to be a bachelor,” he said to himself. “I’ll be hanged if I remember doing more than rumple the girl’s collar; and hey presto! on the strength of a joke she takes upon herself to draw a bill upon you, point-blank!”
Suzanne meanwhile began to cry. “Monsieur,” she said, “I am going to Mme. Granson, the treasurer of the Maternity Fund; she pulled one poor girl in the same straits out of the water (as you may say) to my knowledge.”
“Mme. Granson?”
“Yes. She is related to Mlle. Cormon, the lady patroness of the society. Asking your pardon, some ladies in the town have started a society that will keep many a poor creature from making away with her child, like that pretty Faustine of Argentan did; and paid for it with her life at Mortagne just three years ago.”
“Here, Suzanne,” returned du Bousquier, holding out a key, “open the desk yourself. There is a bag that has been opened, with six hundred francs still left in it. It is all I have.”
Du Bousquier’s chopfallen expression plainly showed how little goodwill went with his compliance.
“An old thief!” said Suzanne to herself. “I will tell tales about his false hair!” Mentally she compared him with that delightful old Chevalier de Valois; he had given her nothing, but he understood her, he had advised her, he had the welfare of his grisettes at heart.
“If you are deceiving me, Suzanne,” exclaimed the object of this unflattering comparison, as he watched her hand in the drawer, “you shall—”
“So, monsieur, you would not give me the money if I asked you for it?” interrupted she with queenly insolence.
Once recalled to the ground of gallantry, recollections of his prime came back to the ex-contractor. He grunted assent. Suzanne took the bag and departed, first submitting her forehead to a kiss which he gave, but in a manner which seemed to say, “This is an expensive privilege; but it is better than being browbeaten by counsel in a court of law as the seducer of a young woman accused of child murder.”
Suzanne slipped the bag into a pouch-shaped basket on her arm, execrating du Bousquier’s stinginess as she did so, for she wanted a thousand francs. If a girl is once possessed by a desire, and has taken the first step in trickery and deceit, she will go to great lengths. As the fair clear-starcher took her way along the Rue du Bercail, it suddenly occurred to her that the Maternity Fund under Mlle. Cormon’s presidency would probably make up the sum which she regarded as sufficient for a start, a very large amount in the eyes of an Alençon grisette. And besides, she hated du Bousquier, and du Bousquier seemed frightened when she talked of confessing her so-called strait to Mme. Granson. Wherefore Suzanne determined that whether or no she made a farthing out of the Maternity Fund, she would entangle du Bousquier in the inextricable undergrowth of the gossip of a country town. There is something of a monkey’s love of mischief in every grisette. Suzanne composed her countenance dolorously and betook herself accordingly to Mme. Granson.
Mme. Granson was the widow of a lieutenant-colonel of artillery who fell at Jena. Her whole yearly income consisted of a pension of nine hundred francs for her lifetime, and her one possession besides was a son whose education and maintenance had absorbed every penny of her savings. She lived in the Rue du Bercail, in one of the cheerless ground-floor apartments through which you can see from back to front at a glance as you walk down the main street of any little town. Three steps, rising pyramid fashion, brought you to the level of the house door, which opened upon a passageway and a little yard beyond, with a wooden-roofed staircase at the further end. Mme. Granson’s kitchen and dining-room occupied the space on one side of the passage, on the other side a single room did duty for a variety of purposes, for the widow’s bedroom among others. Her son, a young man of three-and-twenty, slept upstairs in an attic above the first floor. Athanase Granson contributed six hundred francs to the poor mother’s housekeeping. He was distantly related to Mlle. Cormon, whose influence had obtained him a little post in the registrar’s office, where he was employed in making out certificates of births, marriages, and deaths.
After this, anyone can see the little chilly yellow-curtained parlor, the furniture covered with yellow Utrecht velvet, and Mme. Granson going round the room, after her visitors had left, to straighten the little straw mats put down in front of each chair, so as to save the waxed and polished red brick floor from contact with dirty boots; and, this being accomplished, returning to her place beside her worktable under the portrait of her lieutenant-general. The becushioned armchair, in which she sat at her sewing, was always drawn up between the two windows, so that she could look up and down the Rue du Bercail and see everyone that passed. She was a good sort of woman, dressed with a homely simplicity in keeping with a pale face, beaten thin, as it were, by many cares. You felt the stern soberness of poverty in every little detail in that house, just as you breathed a moral atmosphere of austerity and upright provincial ways.
Mother and son at this moment were sitting together in the dining-room over their breakfast—a cup of coffee, bread and butter and radishes. And here, if the reader is to understand how gladly Mme. Granson heard Suzanne, some explanation of the secret hopes of the household must be given.
Athanase Granson was a thin, hollow-cheeked young man of medium height, with a white face in which a pair of dark
