She looked up at him in some surprise, and very quietly, still going on cutting a quince in quarters:
"Well!... Jacques Maubel...?"
"He is the man."
"The man! what man?"
"You once gave him a red carnation."
She declared she did not understand and asked him to explain himself.
"That aristocrat! that émigré! that scoundrel!"
She shrugged her shoulders, and denied with the most natural air that she had never known a Jacques Maubel.
It was true; she had never known anyone of the name.
She denied she had ever given red carnations to anybody but Évariste; but perhaps, on this point, her memory was not very good.