“Ah! and why, pray? Your family is no more sacred than another, I suppose. Every one at Clermont knows that your father, after selling his business of solicitor, let himself be ruined by a servant. You might have seen your daughters married long ago, had he not taken up with a strumpet when over seventy. There is another who has swindled me!”
Monsieur Josserand turned pale. He replied in a trembling voice, which rose higher as he went on:
“Listen, do not let us throw our relations at each other’s heads. Your father never paid me your dowry, the thirty thousand francs he promised.”
“Eh? what? thirty thousand francs!”
“Exactly; don’t pretend to be surprised. And if my father met with misfortunes, yours behaved in a most disgraceful way towards us. I was never able to find out clearly what he left. There were all sorts of underhand dealings, so that the school in the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor should remain with your sister’s husband, that shabby usher who no longer recognises us now. We were robbed as though in a wood.”
Madame Josserand, now ghastly white, was choking with rage before her husband’s inconceivable revolt.
“Do not say a word against papa! For forty years he was a credit to instruction. Go and talk of the Bachelard Academy in the neighbourhood of the Panthéon! And as for my sister and my brother-in-law, they are what they are. They have robbed me, I know; but it is not for you to say so. I will not permit it, understand that! Do I speak to you of your sister, who eloped with an officer? Oh! you have indeed some nice relations!”
“An officer who married her, madame. There is uncle Bachelard, too, your brother, a man totally destitute of all morality—”
“But you are becoming cracked, sir! He is rich, he earns what he pleases as a commission merchant, and he has promised to provide Berthe’s dowry. Do you then respect nothing?”
“Ah! yes, provide Berthe’s dowry! Will you bet that he will give a sou, and that we shall not have had to put up with his nasty habits for nothing? He makes me feel ashamed of him every time he comes here. A liar, a rake, a person who takes advantage of the situation, who for fifteen years past, seeing us all on our knees before his fortune, has been taking me every Saturday to spend two hours in his office, to go over his books! It saves him five francs. We have never yet been favoured with a single present from him.”