The young girl eould not help laughing. Where had he got the idea from that they were going to marry her? But he nodded his head: he knew it, he felt it. And as his mother intervened to try and calm him, he grasped his knife so tightly that she drew back. However, she trembled for fear he should be overheard, and hastily told Berthe to take him away and lock him in his room; whilst he, becoming crazier than ever, raised his voice:
“I won’t have you married, I won’t have you hurt. If they marry you, I’ll rip their stomachs open.”
Then Berthe put her hands on his shoulders, and looked him straight in the face.
“Listen,” said she, “keep quiet, or I will not love you any more.”
He staggered, despair softened the expression of his face, his eyes filled with tears.
“You won’t love me any more, you won’t love me any more. Don’t say that. Oh! I implore you, say that you will love me still, say that you will love me always, and that you will never love any one else.”
She had seized him by the wrist, and she led him away as gentle as a child.
In the drawing-room Madame Josserand, exaggerating her intimacy, called Campardon her dear neighbour. Why had Madame Campardon not done her the great pleasure of coming also? and on the architect replying that his wife still continued poorly, she exelaimed that they would have been delighted to have received her in her dressing-gown and her slippers. But her smile never left Octave, who was conversing with Monsieur Josserand; all her amiability was directed towards him, over Campardon’s shoulder. When her husband introduced the young man to her, her cordiality was so great that the latter felt quite uncomfortable.
Other guests were arriving; stout mothers with skinny daughters, fathers and uncles scarcely roused from their office drowsiness, pushing before them flocks of marriageable young ladies. Two lamps, with pink paper shades, lit up the drawingroom with a pale light, which only faintly displayed the old, worn, yellow velvet covered furniture, the scratched piano, and the three smoky Swiss views, which looked like black stains on the cold, bare, white and gold panels. And, in this miserly light, the guests—poor, and, so to say, worn-out figures, without resignation, and whose attire was the cause of much pinching and saving—seemed to become obliterated. Madame Josserand wore her fiery costume of the day before; only, with a view of throwing dust in people’s eyes, she had passed the day in sewing sleeves on to the body, and in making herself a lace tippet to cover her shoulders; whilst her two daughters, seated beside her in their dirty cotton jackets, vigorously plied their needles, rearranging with new trimmings their only presentable dresses, which they had been thus altering bit by bit ever since the previous winter.
After each ring at the bell, the sound of whispering issued from the ante-chamber. They conversed in low tones in the gloomy drawing-room, where the forced laugh of some young lady jarred at times like a false note. Behind little Madame Juzeur, Bachelard and Gueulin were nudging each other, and making smutty remarks; and Madame Josserand watched them with an alarmed look, for she dreaded her brother’s vulgar behaviour. But Madame Juzeur might hear anything; her lips quivered, and she smiled with angelic sweetness as she listened to the naughty stories. Uncle Bachelard had the reputation of being a dangerous man. His nephew, on the contrary, was chaste. No matter how splendid the opportunities were, Gueulin declined to have anything to do with women upon principle, not that he disdained them, but because he dreaded the morrows of bliss: always very unpleasant, he said.