“Ah! my God, how stupid I am!” said the Maréchale.
She ransacked a drawer, took out a letter, and made her way rapidly to the Languedoc Gas Lighting Company, in order to get the transfer of her shares.
She came back an hour later. The interest in the shares had been sold to another. The clerk had said, in answer to her demand, while examining the sheet of paper containing Arnoux’s written promise to her: “This document in no way constitutes you the proprietor of the shares. The company has no cognisance of the matter.” In short, he sent her away unceremoniously, while she choked with rage; and Frederick would have to go to Arnoux’s house at once to have the matter cleared up.
But Arnoux would perhaps imagine that he had come to recover in an indirect fashion the fifteen thousand francs due on the mortgage which he had lost; and then this claim from a man who had been his mistress’s lover seemed to him a piece of baseness.
Selecting a middle course, he went to the Dambreuse mansion to get Madame Regimbart’s address, sent a messenger to her residence, and in this way ascertained the name of the café which the Citizen now haunted.
It was the little café on the Place de la Bastille, in which he sat all day in the corner to the right at the lower end of the establishment, never moving any more than if he were a portion of the building.
After having gone successively through the half-cup of coffee, the glass of grog, the “bishop,” the glass of mulled wine, and even the red wine and water, he fell back on beer, and every half hour he let fall this word, “Bock!” having reduced his language to what was actually indispensable. Frederick asked him if he saw Arnoux occasionally.
“No!”
“Look here—why?”
“An imbecile!”
Politics, perhaps, kept them apart, and so Frederick thought it a judicious thing to enquire about Compain.
“What a brute!” said Regimbart.
“How is that?”
“His calf’s head!”
“Ha! explain to me what the calf’s head is!”
Regimbart’s face wore a contemptuous smile.
“Some tomfoolery!”
After a long interval of silence, Frederick went on to ask:
“So, then, he has changed his address?”
“Who?”
“Arnoux!”
“Yes—Rue de Fleurus!”
“What number?”
“Do I associate with the Jesuits?”
“What, Jesuits!”
The Citizen replied angrily:
“With the money of a patriot whom I introduced to him, this pig has set up as a dealer in beads!”
“It isn’t possible!”
“Go there, and see for yourself!”
It was perfectly true; Arnoux, enfeebled by a fit of sickness, had turned religious; besides, he had always had a stock of religion in his composition, and (with that mixture of commercialism and ingenuity which was natural to him), in order to gain salvation and fortune both together, he had begun to traffick in religious objects.
Frederick had no difficulty in discovering his establishment, on whose signboard appeared these words: “Emporium of Gothic Art
—Restoration of articles used in ecclesiastical ceremonies—Church ornaments—Polychromatic sculpture—Frankincense of the Magi, Kings, etc., etc.”
At the two corners of the shopwindow rose two wooden statues, streaked with gold, cinnabar, and azure, a Saint John the Baptist with his sheepskin, and a Saint Genevieve with roses in her apron and a distaff under her arm; next, groups in plaster, a good sister teaching a little girl, a mother on her knees beside a little bed, and three collegians before the holy table. The prettiest object there was a kind of châlet representing the interior of a crib with the ass, the ox, and the child Jesus stretched on straw—real straw. From the top to the bottom of the shelves could be seen medals by the dozen, every sort of beads, holy-water basins in the form of shells, and portraits of ecclesiastical dignitaries, amongst whom Monsignor Affre and our Holy Father shone forth with smiles on their faces.
Arnoux sat asleep at his counter with his head down. He had aged terribly. He had even round his temples a wreath of rosebuds, and the reflection of the gold crosses touched by the rays of the sun fell over him.
Frederick was filled with sadness at this spectacle of decay. Through devotion to the Maréchale he, however, submitted to the ordeal, and stepped forward. At the end of the shop Madame Arnoux showed herself; thereupon, he turned on his heel.
“I couldn’t see him,” he said, when he came back to Rosanette.
And in vain he went on to promise that he would write at once to his notary at Havre for some money—she flew into a rage. She had never seen a man so weak, so flabby. While she was enduring a thousand privations, other people were enjoying themselves.
Frederick was thinking about poor Madame Arnoux, and picturing to himself the heartrending impoverishment of her surroundings. He had seated himself before the writing-desk; and, as Rosanette’s voice still kept up its bitter railing:
“Ah! in the name of Heaven, hold your tongue!”
“Perhaps you are going to defend them?”
“Well, yes!” he exclaimed; “for what’s the cause of this display of fury?”
“But why is it that you don’t want to make them pay up? ’Tis for fear of vexing your old flame—confess it!”
He felt an inclination to smash her head with the timepiece. Words failed him. He relapsed into silence.
Rosanette, as she walked up and down the room, continued:
“I am going to hurl a writ at this Arnoux of yours. Oh! I don’t want your assistance. I’ll get legal advice.”
Three days later, Delphine rushed abruptly into the room where her mistress sat.
“Madame! madame! there’s a man here with a pot of paste who has given me a fright!”
Rosanette made her way down to the kitchen, and saw there a vagabond whose face was pitted with smallpox. Moreover, one of his arms was paralysed, and he was three fourths drunk, and hiccuped every time he attempted to speak.
This was Maître Gautherot’s bill-sticker. The objections raised against the seizure having been overruled, the sale followed as a matter of course.
For his trouble in getting up the stairs he demanded, in the first place, a half-glass of brandy; then he wanted another favour,
