Clotilde again shrugged her shoulders. Then Auguste seemed disposed to give her time to consider: he would wait a few minutes longer, more especially as Trublot had taken Octave into the parlor. The other ladies were still uneasy, for they had heard the husband whisper in his wife’s ear:
“If he comes back here, you must get up and follow me. Otherwise, you may return to your mother’s.”
In the parlor, the gentlemen greeted Octave quite as cordially. If Léon made a point of showing a little coolness, Uncle Bachelard, and even Théophile, seemed to declare, as they held out their hands to Octave, that the family forgot everything. He congratulated Campardon, who, decorated two days previously, now wore a broad red ribbon; and the beaming architect scolded him for never calling now and then to pass an hour with his wife: though one got married, it was scarcely nice to forget friends of fifteen years’ standing. But the young man felt quite surprised and anxious as he stood before Duveyrier. He had not seen him since his recovery. He looked uneasily at his jaw, all out of place, dropping too much on the left side, and which now gave a horrid squinting expression to his countenance. Then, when the counselor spoke, he had another surprise: his voice had lowered two tones; it had become quite sepulchral.
“Don’t you think him much better thus?” said Trublot to Octave, as they returned to the drawing-room door. “It positively gives him a certain majestic air. I saw him presiding at the assizes, the day before yesterday—Listen! they are talking of it.”
And indeed the gentlemen had abandoned politics to take up morality. They were listening to Duveyrier as he gave some details of an affair in which his attitude had been particularly noticed. He was even about to be named a president and an officer of the Legion of Honor. It was respecting an infanticide already a year old. The unnatural mother, a regular savage, as he said, happened to be the boot-stitcher, his former tenant, that tall, pale and friendless girl, whose pregnant condition had roused Monsieur Gourd’s indignation so much. And besides that, she was altogether stupid! for, without reflecting that her appearance would betray her, she had gone and cut her child in two and kept it at the bottom of a bonnet-box. She had naturally told the jury quite a ridiculous romance: a seducer who had deserted her; misery, hunger, and then a fit of mad despair on seeing herself unable to supply the little one’s wants: in a word, the same story they all told. But it was necessary to make an example. Duveyrier congratulated himself on having summed up with that lucidity which often decided a jury’s verdict.
“And what was your sentence?” asked the doctor.
“Five years,” replied the counselor in his new voice, which seemed both hoarse and sepulchral. “It is time to oppose a dyke to the debauchery which threatens to submerge Paris.”
Trublot nudged Octave’s elbow; they were both acquainted with the facts of the attempt at suicide.
“Eh? you hear him?” murmured he. “Without joking, it improves his voice: it stirs one more, does it not? it goes straight to the heart now. Ah! if you had only seen him, standing up, draped in his long red robes, with his mug all askew! On my word! he quite frightened me; he was extraordinary; oh! you know! a style in his majesty enough to make your flesh creep!”
But he left off speaking, and listened to the ladies in the drawingroom, who were again on the subject of servants. That very morning, Madame Duveyrier had given Julie a week’s notice; she had nothing certainly to say against the girl’s cooking; only, good behavior came before everything in her eyes. The truth was that, warned by Doctor Juillerat, and anxious for the health of her son, whose little goings-on she tolerated at home, so as to keep them under control, she had had an explanation with Julie, who had been unwell for some time past; and the latter, like a genteel cook, whose style was not to quarrel with her employers, had accepted her week’s notice. Madame Josserand at once shared Clotilde’s indignation; yes, one should be very strict on the question of morality; for instance, if she kept that slut Adèle in spite of her dirty ways, and her stupidity, it was because the girl was virtuous. Oh! on that point, she had nothing whatever to reproach her with!