“I would do so willingly, only I have nothing to tell you.”
“What! you have not watched the marquis?”
“Your husband? Excuse me, I have followed him; like his own shadow. But what would you have me say to you; since the duke left for Paris, your husband has charge of everything. Ah! you would not recognize him! He is always busy now. He is up at cock-crow and he goes to bed with the chickens. He writes letters all the morning. In the afternoon he receives all who call upon him. The retired officers are hand and glove in with him. He has reinstated five or six of them, and he has granted pensions to two others. He seldom goes out, and never in the evening.”
He paused and for more than a minute Blanche was silent. She was confused and agitated by the question that rose to her lips. What humiliation! But she conquered her embarrassment, and turning away her head to hide her crimson face, she said:
“But he certainly has a mistress!”
Chupin burst into a noisy laugh.
“Well, we have come to it at last,” he said, with an audacious familiarity that made Blanche shudder. “You mean that scoundrel Lacheneur’s daughter, do you not? that stuck-up minx, Marie-Anne?”
Blanche felt that denial was useless.
“Yes,” she answered; “it is Marie-Anne that I mean.”
“Ah, well! she has been neither seen nor heard from. She must have fled with another of her lovers, Maurice d’Escorval.”