“If we buy horses for ourselves in this way, we shall not sell them long to those that come to buy of us,” said du Ronceret’s set.
The reasoning seemed profound, stupid though it was, in so far as it prevented the district from securing a monopoly of money from outside. In the political economy of the provinces the wealth of nations consists not so much in a brisk circulation of money as in hoards of unproductive coin.
At length the old maid’s fatal wish was fulfilled. Penelope sank under the attack of pleurisy contracted forty days before the wedding. Nothing could save her. Mme. Granson, Mariette, Mme. du Coudrai, Mme. du Ronceret—the whole town, in fact—noticed that the bride came into church with the left foot foremost, an omen all the more alarming because the word Left even then had acquired a political significance. The officiating priest chanced to open the mass-book at the De profundis. And so the wedding passed off, amid presages so ominous, so gloomy, so overwhelming, that nobody was found to augur well of it. Things went from bad to worse. There was no attempt at a wedding party; the bride and bridegroom started out for the Prébaudet. Paris fashions were to supplant old customs! In the evening Alençon said its say as to all these absurdities; some persons had reckoned upon one of the usual provincial jollifications, which they considered they had a right to expect, and these spoke their minds pretty freely. But Mariette and Jacquelin had a merry wedding, and they alone in all Alençon gainsaid the dismal prophecies.
Du Bousquier wished to spend the profit made by the sale of his house on restoring and modernizing the Hôtel Cormon. He had quite made up his mind to stay for some months at the Prébaudet, whither he brought his uncle de Sponde. The news spread dismay through Alençon; everyone felt that du Bousquier was about to draw the country into the downward path of domestic comfort. The foreboding grew to a fear one morning when du Bousquier drove over from the Prébaudet to superintend his workmen at the Val-Noble; and the townspeople beheld a tilbury, harnessed to a new horse, and René in livery by his master’s side. Du Bousquier had invested his wife’s savings in the funds which stood at sixty-seven francs fifty centimes. This was the first act of the new administration. In the space of one year, by constantly speculating for a rise, he made for himself a fortune almost as considerable as his wife’s. But something else happened in connection with this marriage to make it seem yet more inauspicious, and put all previous overwhelming portents and alarming innovations into the background.
It was the evening of the wedding day. Athanase and his mother were sitting in the salon by the little fire of brushwood (or régalades, as they say in the patois), which the servant had lighted after dinner.
“Well,” said Mme. Granson, “we will go to President du Ronceret’s tonight, now that we have no Mlle. Cormon. Goodness me! I shall never get used to calling her Mme. du Bousquier; that name makes my lips sore.”
Athanase looked at his mother with a sad constraint; he could not smile, and he wanted to acknowledge, as it were, the artless thoughtfulness which soothed the wound it could not heal.
“Mamma,” he began—it was several years since he had used that word, and his tones were so gentle that they sounded like the voice of his childhood—“mamma, dear, do not let us go out just yet; it is so nice here by the fire!”
It was a supreme cry of mortal anguish; the mother heard it and did not understand.
“Let us stay, child,” she said. “I would certainly rather talk with you and listen to your plans than play at boston and perhaps lose my money.”
“You are beautiful tonight; I like to look at you. And besides, the current of my thoughts is in harmony with this poor little room, where we have been through so much trouble you and I.”
“And there is still more in store for us, poor Athanase, until your work succeeds. For my own part, I am used to poverty; but, oh, my treasure, to look on and see your youth go by while you have no joy of it! Nothing but work in your life! That thought is like a disease for a mother. It tortures me night and morning. I wake up to it. Ah, God in heaven! what have I done? What sin of mine is punished with this?”
She left her seat, took a little chair, and sat down beside Athanase, nestling close up to his side, till she could lay her head on her child’s breast. Where a mother is truly a mother, the grace of love never dies. Athanase kissed her on the eyes, on the gray hair, on the forehead, with the reverent love that fain would lay the soul where the lips are laid.
“I shall never succeed,” he said, trying to hide the fatal purpose which he was revolving in his mind.
“Pooh! you are not going to be discouraged? Mind can do all things, as you say. With ten bottles of ink, ten reams of paper, and a strong will, Luther turned Europe upside down. Well, and you are going to make a great name for yourself; you are going
