He turned away in order to conceal his embarrassment and suddenly threw himself back horrified.
“What is it?” asked Rosalie, looking out of the window too.
There was the placard of the skating-rink, enormous, printed in crying colors which showed out under the rainy and gray sky, repeating itself at every street corner, on every vacant space of a naked wall and on the planks of temporary fences. It showed a gigantic troubadour encircled with living pictures as a border—all blotches in yellow, green and blue, with the ochre color of the tabor placed across the figure. The long hoarding which surrounded the new building of the city hall, past which their carriage was going at the moment, was covered with this coarse and noisy advertisement, which was stupefying even to Parisian idiocy.
“My executioner!” said Roumestan with an expression of comic dismay. Rosalie found fault with him gently.
“No—your victim! and would that he were the only one! But somebody else has caught fire from your enthusiasm—”
“Who can that be?”
“Hortense.”
Then she told him what she had finally proved to be a certainty, notwithstanding the mysteries made by the young girl—namely, her affection for this peasant, a thing which at first she had believed a mere fancy, but which worried her now like a moral aberration in her sister.
The Minister was in a state of indignation.
“How can it be possible? That hobnail, that bog-trotter!”