“Pshaw! you must be joking. After what happened I could not meet your wife face to face. Just think a little! There I was right before her, the codfish à la brandade in my hand. It took a mighty lot of coolness, I can tell you, not to let everything drop.”
“Rosalie is no longer at the Ministry,” said Numa quite overwhelmed.
“You astonish me; do you mean to say that it has not been arranged?”
And indeed it did not seem possible to him that Madame Numa, a person of so much good sense ... for after all, what was all this business anyhow? “Come now, just a mere fancy!”
The other interrupted him:
“You don’t understand her—she is an implacable woman—the perfect image of her father—Northern race, my dear fellow—with them it is not as it is with us, where the greatest anger evaporates in gesticulations and threats and then there is nothing left and we face about. But they keep everything in mind; it is terrible.”
He did not say that she had already forgiven him once before; and then, in order to escape from his sorrowful thoughts:
“Get your clothes on; you must come and dine with me.”
While Bompard was making his toilet out in the corridor the Minister looked about the mansard room lit by a little window like a tobacco-box, over which the melting snow was running. Pity seized him face to face with this penury, these damp rags, the whitewashed paper and little stove worn with rust and fireless notwithstanding the cold. And he asked himself, used as he was to the sumptuousness of his palace, how people could live in such a place?
“Have you seen the gardeen?” cried Bompard joyfully from his basin.