"Why?"
"It would make the audience more disposed to be charitable."
"We'll see about that, sir, we'll see about it. Well, Emma Durand—will that do? What do you think, mamma?"
"They are not our sort of people, my dear," answered Mme. Mauperin quickly; "they are all very well at a distance, people like that, but every one knows where they sprang from—the Rue St. Honoré. Mme. Durand used to go and receive the ladies at their carriage-door, and M. Durand would slip out at the back and take the servant-men to have a glass at the wine-shop round the corner. That's how the Durands made their fortune."
Although at bottom Mme. Mauperin was an excellent sort of woman she rarely lost an opportunity of depreciating, in this way and with the most superb contempt and disgust, the wealth, birth and position of all the people she knew. It was not out of spite, nor was it for the pleasure of slandering and backbiting, nor yet because she was envious. She would refuse to believe in the respectability and uprightness of people, or even in the wealth they were said to have, simply from a prodigious bourgeois pride, from a conviction that outside her own family there could be no good blood, and no integrity; that, with the exception of her own people, every one was an upstart; that nothing was substantial except what she possessed, and that what she had not was not worth having.
"And to think that my wife has tales like that to tell about all the people we know!" said M. Mauperin.
"Come now, papa—shall we have the pretty little Remoli girl—shall we?"
"Ask your mother. Say on, Mme. Mauperin."
"The Remoli girl? But, my dear, you know—"
"I know nothing."