Octave, nevertheless, had great difficulty in getting to sleep. He kept feverishly turning over, his brain occupied with the new faces he had seen. Why the devil were the Campardons so amiable? Were they dreaming of marrying their daughter to him later on? Perhaps, too, the husband took him to board with them so that he might amuse and enliven the wife? And that poor lady, what peculiar complaint could she be suffering from? Then his ideas got more mixed; he saw shadows pass—? little Madame Pichon, his neighbour, with her clear empty glances; beautiful Madame Hédouin, correct and grave in her black dress; and Madame Vabre’s ardent eyes, and Mademoiselle Josserand’s gay laugh. How they swarmed in a few hours in the streets of Paris! It had always been his dream, ladies who would take him by the hand and help him in his affairs. But these kept returning and mingling with fatiguing obstinacy. He knew not which to choose; he tried to keep his voice soft, his gestures cajoling. And suddenly, worn-out, exasperated, he yielded to his brutal inner nature, to the ferocious disdain in which he held woman, beneath his air of amorous adoration.
“Are they going to let me sleep at all?” said he out loud, turning violently on to his back. “The first who likes, it is the same to me, and all together if it pleases them! To sleep now, it will be daylight to-morrow.”
CHAPTER II.
When Madame Josserand, preceded by her young ladies, left the evening party given by Madame Dambreville, who resided on a fourth floor in the Rue de Rivoli, at the corner of the Rue de l’Oratoire, she roughly slammed the street door, in the sudden outburst of a passion she had been keeping under for the past two hours. Berthe, her younger daughter, had again just gone and missed a husband.
“Well! what are you doing there?” said she angrily to the young girls, who were standing under the arcade and watching the cabs pass by. “Walk on! don’t have any idea we are going to ride! To waste another two francs, eh?”
And as Hortense, the elder, murmured:
“It will be pleasant, with this mud. My shoes will never recover it.”
“Walk on!” resumed the mother, all beside herself. “When you have no more shoes, you can stop in bed, that’s all. A deal of good it is, taking you out!”
Berthe and Hortense bowed their heads and turned into the Rue de l’Oratoire. They held their long skirts up as high as they could over their crinolines, squeezing their shoulders together and shivering under their thin opera-cloaks. Madame Josserand followed behind, wrapped in an old fur cloak made of Calabar skins, looking as shabby as cats’. All three, without bonnets, had their hair enveloped in lace wraps, head-dresses which caused the last passers-by to look back, surprised at seeing them glide along the houses, one by one, with bent backs, and their eyes fixed on the puddles. And the mother’s exasperation increased still more at the recollection of many similar returns home, for three winters past, hampered by their gay dresses, amidst the black mud of the streets and the jeers of belated blackguards. No, decidedly, she had had enough of dragging her young ladies about to the four corners of Paris, without daring to venture on the luxury of a cab, for fear of having to omit a dish from the morrow’s dinner!
“And she makes marriages!” said she out loud, returning to Madame Dambreville, and talking alone to ease herself, without even addressing her daughters, who had turned down the Rue Saint-Honoré. “They are pretty, her marriages! A lot of impertinent minxes, who come from no one knows where! Ah! if one was not obliged! It’s like her last success, that bride whom she brought out, to show us that it did not always fail; a fine specimen! a wretched child who had to be sent back to her convent for six months, after a little mistake, to be re-whitewashed!”