Of what belonged to both, the baby’s layette was all that she carried off.
Standing at the door of the coach the mystified Englishwoman asked if Madame was not going to dine at home. No, she will dine at her father’s where probably she will also pass the night.
On the way a doubt overcame her, or rather a scruple. Suppose nothing of all this were true? Suppose that Bachellery girl did not live in the Rue de Londres. She gave the coachman the address, but without much hope; still, she must have certainty on this point.
The carriage stopped before a little house two stories high, crowned by a terrace for a summer garden; it was the old home in Paris of a Cairo man who had just died a bankrupt. There was about it the look of a little house with shutters closed and curtains drawn; a strong odor of the kitchen rose from the brightly lit and noisy basement. Rosalie understood what it was just from noting how the front door obeyed three strokes of the bell and of itself seemed to turn upon its hinges. A Persian tapestry caught up by heavy cords in the centre of the antechamber allowed a glimpse of the stair with its soft carpet and its lamps in which the gas was burning at the highest point. She heard laughter, took two steps forward and saw what never more in her life she could forget.
At the turn of the stairs on the first floor Numa was leaning over the banisters red and excited, in his shirt sleeves, with his arm round the waist of that girl, who was also very much excited, her hair loosened and falling down her back upon the frills of a rose-colored silk morning-gown. And there he was, calling out in his violent way:
“Bompard, bring up the brandade!”
That was where he could be seen as he really was, the Minister of Public Instruction and Religion, the great proclaimer of religious morality, the defender of sound doctrines! It was there he showed himself without mask or hypocritical grimace—all his South turned outside for inspection!—at ease and in his shirt-sleeves as if at the Fair of Beaucaire.
“Bompard, bring up the brandade!” repeated the giddy girl, intentionally exaggerating Numa’s Provençal accent. Without a question that was Bompard, the improvised cookshop boy who came up from the kitchen, a napkin over his shoulder and his arms surrounding a great big dish. It was he who caused the sounding wing of the door to turn on its hinges.
CHAPTER XVIII.
NEW YEAR’S DAY.
“Gentlemen of the Central Administration!”