He stopped her.
“Which means that you have none at all,” he said. “Very well. You must go this very day and get yourself one,—a very handsome, a magnificent one; and you’ll send it to be made to a fashionable dressmaker. And at the same time you had better get some little suits for Maxence and Gilberte. Here are a thousand francs.”
Completely bewildered:
“Who in the world are you going to invite, then?” she asked.
“The Baron and the Baroness de Thaller,” he replied with an emphasis full of conviction. “So try and distinguish yourself. Our fortune is at stake.”
That this dinner was a matter of considerable import, Mme. Favoral could not doubt when she saw her husband’s fabulous liberality continue without flinching for a number of days.
Ten times of an afternoon he would come home to tell his wife the name of some dish that had been mentioned before him, or to consult her on the subject of some exotic viand he had just noticed in some shop-window. Daily he brought home wines of the most fantastic vintages,—those wines which dealers manufacture for the special use of verdant fools, and which they sell in odd-shaped bottles previously overlaid with secular dust and cobwebs.
He subjected to a protracted cross-examination the cook whom Mme. Favoral had engaged, and demanded that she should enumerate the houses where she had cooked. He absolutely required the man who was to wait at the table to exhibit the dress-coat he was to wear.
The great day having come, he did not stir from the house, going and coming from the kitchen to the dining-room, uneasy, agitated, unable to stay in one place. He breathed only when he had seen the table set and loaded with the new china he had purchased and the magnificent silver he had gone to hire in person. And when his young wife made her appearance, looking lovely in her new dress, and leading by the hands the two children, Maxence and Gilberte, in their new suits:
“That’s perfect,” he exclaimed, highly delighted. “Nothing could be better. Now, let our four guests come!”