But with a significant glance towards her niece, Madame Dambreuse laid a finger on her lips, while the smile which escaped from her contradicted this display of austerity.
Suddenly, Martinon appeared at the door directly in front of her. She arose at once. He offered her his arm. Frederick, in order to watch the progress of these gallantries on Martinon’s part, walked past the card-table, and came up with them in the large drawing-room. Madame Dambreuse very soon quitted her cavalier, and began chatting with Frederick himself in a very familiar tone.
She understood that he did not play cards, and did not dance.
“Young people have a tendency to be melancholy!” Then, with a single comprehensive glance around:
“Besides, this sort of thing is not amusing—at least for certain natures!”
And she drew up in front of the row of armchairs, uttering a few polite remarks here and there, while some old men with double eyeglasses came to pay court to her. She introduced Frederick to some of them. M. Dambreuse touched him lightly on the elbow, and led him out on the terrace.
He had seen the Minister. The thing was not easy to manage. Before he could be qualified for the post of auditor to the Council of State, he should pass an examination. Frederick, seized with an unaccountable self-confidence, replied that he had a knowledge of the subjects prescribed for it.
The financier was not surprised at this, after all the eulogies M. Roque had pronounced on his abilities.
At the mention of this name, a vision of little Louise, her house and her room, passed through his mind, and he remembered how he had on nights like this stood at her window listening to the wagoners driving past. This recollection of his griefs brought back the thought of Madame Arnoux, and he relapsed into silence as he continued to pace up and down the terrace. The windows shone amid the darkness like slabs of flame. The buzz of the ball gradually grew fainter; the carriages were beginning to leave.
“Why in the world,” M. Dambreuse went on, “are you so anxious to be attached to the Council of State?”
And he declared, in the tone of a man of broad views, that the public functions led to nothing—he could speak with some authority on that point—business was much better.
Frederick urged as an objection the difficulty of grappling with all the details of business.
“Pooh! I could post you up well in them in a very short time.”
Would he like to be a partner in any of his own undertakings?
The young man saw, as by a lightning-flash, an enormous fortune coming into his hands.
“Let us go in again,” said the banker. “You are staying for supper with us, are you not?”
It was three o’clock. They left the terrace.
In the dining-room, a table at which supper was served up awaited the guests.
M. Dambreuse perceived Martinon, and, drawing near his wife, in a low tone:
“Is it you who invited him?”
She answered dryly:
“Yes, of course.”
The niece was not present.
The guests drank a great deal of wine, and laughed very loudly; and risky jokes did not give any offence, all present experiencing that sense of relief which follows a somewhat prolonged period of constraint.
Martinon alone displayed anything like gravity. He refused to drink champagne, as he thought this good form, and, moreover, he assumed an air of tact and politeness, for when M. Dambreuse, who had a contracted chest, complained of an oppression, he made repeated enquiries about that gentleman’s health, and then let his blue eyes wander in the direction of Madame Dambreuse.
She questioned Frederick in order to find out which of the young ladies he liked best. He had noticed none of them in particular, and besides, he preferred the women of thirty.
“There, perhaps, you show your sense,” she returned.
Then, as they were putting on their pelisses and paletots, M. Dambreuse said to him:
“Come and see me one of these mornings and we’ll have a chat.”
Martinon, at the foot of the stairs, was lighting a cigar, and, as he puffed it, he presented such a heavy profile that his companion allowed this remark to escape from him:
“Upon my word, you have a fine head!”
“It has turned a few other heads,” replied the young magistrate, with an air of mingled self-complacency and annoyance.
As soon as Frederick was in bed, he summed up the main features of the evening party. In the first place, his own toilet (he had looked at himself several times in the mirrors), from the cut of his coat to the knot of his pumps left nothing to find fault with. He had spoken to influential men, and seen wealthy ladies at close quarters. M. Dambreuse had shown himself to be an admirable type of man, and Madame Dambreuse an almost bewitching type of woman. He weighed one by one her slightest words, her looks, a thousand things incapable of being analysed. It would be a right good thing to have such a mistress. And, after all, why should he not? He would have as good a chance with her as any other man. Perhaps she was not so hard to win? Then Martinon came back to his recollection; and, as he fell asleep, he smiled with pity for this worthy fellow.
He woke up with the thought of the Maréchale in his mind. Those words of her note, “After tomorrow evening,” were in fact an appointment for the very same day.
He waited until nine o’clock, and then hurried to her house.
Someone who had been going up the stairs before him shut the door. He rang the bell; Delphine came out and told him that “Madame” was not there.
Frederick persisted, begging of her to admit him. He had something of a very serious nature to communicate to her; only a word would suffice. At length, the hundred-sous-piece argument proved successful, and the maid let him into the anteroom.
Rosanette appeared. She was in
