The unhappy creature shudders, struggles.
"Don't ask me any questions. I will not tell you anything. Adieu!"
And he rejoins, straining her to his heart:
"What can you tell me that I do not know already, my poor mother? Didn't you understand why I left his house six months ago?"
"You know?"
"Everything. And this that has happened to you to-day I have long foreseen and hoped for."
"Oh! wretched, wretched woman that I am, why did I come?"
"Because this is your proper place, because you owe me ten years of my mother. You see that I must keep you."
He says this kneeling in front of the couch upon which she has thrown herself in a flood of tears and with the last plaintive outcries of her wounded pride. For a long while she weeps thus, her son at her feet. And lo! the Joyeuses, anxious at André's non-appearance, come up in a body in search of him. There is a veritable invasion of innocent faces, waving curls, modest costumes, rippling gayety, and over the whole group shines the great lamp, the good old lamp with the huge shade, which M. Joyeuse solemnly holds aloft as high and as straight as he can, in the attitude of a canephora. They halt abruptly, dumbfounded, at sight of that pale, sad woman who gazes, deeply moved, at all those smiling, charming creatures, especially at Élise, who stands a little behind the others, and whose embarrassment in making that indiscreet visit stamps her as the fiancée.
"Élise, kiss our mother and thank her. She has come to live with her children."