M. Paillot rubbed the red beard that hung from his huge chin and looked stupidly at M. Bergeret. Finally he fled panic-stricken and took refuge behind his counter. But M. Bergeret followed up his argument to its logical conclusion:
“It is thanks to these successive additions that the house is still standing. It would soon crumble to pieces if nothing were ever changed in it. It is only right to repair the parts that threaten to fall in ruin and to add some halls in the new style. But I can hear some ominous cracking in the structure.”
As honest Paillot carefully refrained from making any answer to this occult and terrifying talk, M. Bergeret plunged silently into the corner where the old books stood.
To-day, as always, he took up the thirty-eighth volume of l’Histoire Générale des Voyages. To-day, as always, the book opened of its own accord at page 212. Now on this page he saw the picture of M. Roux and Madame Bergeret embracing.... Now he re-read the passage he knew so well, without paying any heed to what he read, but merely continuing to think the thoughts that were suggested by the present state of his affairs:
“‘a passage to the North. It is to this check,’ said he (I know that this affair is by no means an unprecedented one, and that it ought not to astonish the mind of a philosopher), ‘that we owe the opportunity of being able to visit the Sandwich Islands again’ (It is a domestic event that turns my house upside down. I have no longer a home), ‘and to enrich our voyage with a discovery (I have no home, no home any more) which, although the last (I am morally free though, and that is a great point), seems in many respects to be the most important that Europeans have yet made in the whole expanse of the Pacific Ocean....’”
M. Bergeret closed the book. He had caught a glimpse of liberty, deliverance, and a new life. It was only a glimmer in the darkness, but bright and steady before him. How was he to escape from this dark tunnel? That he could not tell, but at any rate he perceived at the end of it a tiny white point of light. And if he still carried about with him a vision of Madame Bergeret embraced by M. Roux, it was to him but an indecorous sight which aroused in him neither anger nor disgust—just a vignette, the Belgian frontispiece of some lewd book. He drew out his watch and saw that it was now two o’clock. It had taken him exactly ninety minutes to arrive at this wise conclusion.
VII
After M. Bergeret had taken the University Bulletin from the table and gone out of the room without saying a word, M. Roux and Madame Bergeret together emitted a long sigh of relief.