At eleven o’clock, before setting her breakfast on the fire, Martine came to her for a moment, the eternal stocking in her hand which she was always knitting even while walking, when she was not occupied in the affairs of the house.
“Do you know that he is still shut up there like a wolf in his hole, at his villainous cookery?”
Clotilde shrugged her shoulders, without lifting her eyes from her embroidery.
“And then, mademoiselle, if you only knew what they say! Mme. Félicité was right yesterday when she said that it was really enough to make one blush. They threw it in my face that he had killed old Boutin, that poor old man, you know, who had the falling sickness and who died on the road. To believe those women of the faubourg, every one into whom he injects his remedy gets the true cholera from it, without counting that they accuse him of having taken the devil into partnership.”
A short silence followed. Then, as the young girl became more gloomy than before, the servant resumed, moving her fingers still more rapidly:
“As for me, I know nothing about the matter, but what he is making there enrages me. And you, mademoiselle, do you approve of that cookery?”
At last Clotilde raised her head quickly, yielding to the flood of passion that swept over her.
“Listen; I wish to know no more about it than you do, but I think that he is on a very dangerous path. He no longer loves us.”
“Oh, yes, mademoiselle; he loves us.”
“No, no; not as we love him. If he loved us, he would be here with us, instead of endangering his soul and his happiness and ours, up there, in his desire to save everybody.”