"Dame, mamma,—whatever you please."
"Ah! I knew you loved your dear darling mamma!" exclaimed the monstrous creature embracing him. "Well! invite her to dinner to-night. You can get up two bottles of our Lunel—at two francs—the heady kind. And be sure she comes. Make eyes at her, so that she'll think to-day's the great day. Put on your fine gloves: they'll make you look more dignified."
Germinie arrived at seven o'clock, happy and bright and hopeful, her head filled with blissful dreams by the mysterious air with which Jupillon delivered his mother's invitation. They dined and drank and made merry. Mère Jupillon began to cast glances expressive of deep emotion, drowned in tears, upon the couple sitting opposite her. When the coffee was served, she said, as if for the purpose of being left alone with Germinie: "Bibi, you know you have an errand to do this evening."
Jupillon went out. Madame Jupillon, as she sipped her coffee, turned to Germinie the face of a mother seeking to learn her daughter's secret, and, in her indulgence, forgiving her in advance of her confession. For a moment the two women sat thus, silent, one waiting for the other to speak, the other with the cry of her heart on her lips. Suddenly Germinie rushed from her chair into the stout woman's arms.
"If you knew, Madame Jupillon!"
She talked and wept and embraced her all at once. "Oh! you won't be angry with me! Well! yes, I love him—I've had a child by him. It's true, I love him. Three years ago——"
At every word Madame Jupillon's face became sterner and more icy. She coldly pushed Germinie away, and in her most doleful voice, with an accent of lamentation and hopeless desolation, she began, like a person who is suffocating: "Oh! my God—you!—tell me such things as that!—me!—his mother!—to my face! My God, must it be? My son—a child—an innocent child! You've had the face to ruin him for me! And now you tell me that you did it! No, it ain't possible, my God! And I had such confidence. There's nothing worth living for. There's no trusting anybody in this world! All the same, mademoiselle, I wouldn't ever 'a' believed it of you. Dame! such things give me a turn. Ah! this upsets me completely. I know myself, and I'm quite likely to be sick after this——"
"Madame Jupillon! Madame Jupillon!" Germinie murmured in an imploring tone, half dead with shame and grief on the chair on which she had fallen. "I beg you to forgive me. It was stronger than I was. And then I thought—I believed——"
"You believed! Oh! my God; you believed! What did you believe? That you'd be my son's wife, eh? Ah! Lord God! is it possible, my poor child?"
And adopting a more and more plaintive and lamentable tone as the words she hurled at Germinie cut deeper and deeper, Mère Jupillon continued: "But, my poor girl, you must have a reason, let's hear it. What did I always tell you? That it would be all right if you'd been born ten years earlier. Let's see, your date was 1820, you told me, and now it's '49. You're getting on toward thirty, you see, my dear child. I say! it makes me feel bad to say that to you—I'd so much rather not hurt you. But a body only has to look at you, my poor young lady. What can I do? It's your age—your hair—I can lay my finger in the place where you part it."