Then, Madame Josserand’s rage burst all bounds.
“Ah! I swear to you that it sha’n’t come to nothing next time, even if I have to tie him to you myself! There is one who shall pay for all the others. Yes, yes, Monsieur Josserand, you may stare at me, as though you did not understand: the wedding shall take place, and without you, if it does not please you. You hear, Berthe! you have only to pick that one up!” Saturnin appeared not to hear. He was looking under the table. The young girl pointed to him; but Madame Josserand made a gesture which seemed to imply that he would be got out of the way. And Berthe murmured:
“So then it is decidedly to be Monsieur Vabre? Oh! it is all the same to me. To think though that not a single sandwich has been saved for me?”
CHAPTER IV.
AS early as the morrow, Octave commenced to occupy himself about Valérie. He studied her habits, and ascertained the hour when he would have a chance of meeting her on the stairs; and he arranged matters so that he could frequently go up to his room, taking advantage of his coming home to lunch at the Campardons’, and leaving “The Ladies’ Paradise” for a few minutes under some pretext or other. He soon noticed that, every day towards two o’clock, the young woman, who took her child to the Tuileries gardens, passed along the Rue Gaillon. Then he would stand at the door, wait till she came, and greet her with one of his handsome shopman’s smiles. At each of their meetings, Valérie politely inclined her head and passed on; but he perceived her dark glance to be full of passionate fire; he found encouragement in her ravaged complexion and in the supple swing of her gait.
His plan was already formed, the bold plan of a seducer used to cavalierly overcoming the virtue of shop-girls. It was simply a question of luring Valérie inside his room on the fourth floor; the staircase was always silent and deserted, no one would discover them up there; and he laughed at the thought of the architect’s moral admonitions; for taking a woman belonging to the house was not the same as bringing one into it.
One thing, however, made Octave uneasy. The passage separated the Pichons’ kitchen from their dining-room, and this obliged them to constantly have their door open. At nine o’clock in the morning, the husband started off for his office, and did not return home until about five in the evening; and, on alternate days of the week, he went out again after his dinner to do some bookkeeping, from eight to midnight. Besides this, though, the young woman, who was very reserved—almost wildly timid—would push her door to, directly she heard Octave’s footsteps. He never caught sight of more than her back, which always seemed to be flying away, with her light hair done up into a scanty chignon. Through that door kept discreetly ajar, he had, up till then, only beheld a small portion of the room: sad and clean looking furniture, linen of a dull whiteness in the grey light admitted through a window which he could not see, and the corner of a child’s crib inside an inner room; all the monotonous solitude of a wife occupied from morning to night with the recurring cares of a clerk’s home. Moreover, there was never a sound; the child seemed dumb and worn-out like the mother; one scarcely distinguished at times the soft murmur of some ballad which the latter would hum for hours together in an expiring voice. But Octave was none the less furious with the disdainful creature as he called her. She was playing the spy upon him perhaps. In any case, Valérie could never come up to him if the Pichons’ door was thus being continually opened.
He was just beginning to think that things were taking the right course. One Sunday when the husband was absent, he had manoeuvred in such a way as to be on the first-floor landing at the moment the young woman, wrapped in her dressing-gown, was leaving her sister-in-law’s to return to her own apartments; and she being obliged to speak to him, they had stood some minutes exchanging polite remarks. So he was hoping that next time she would ask him in. With a woman with such a temperament the rest would follow as a matter of course. That evening during dinner, there was some talk about Valérie at the Campardons’. Octave tried to draw the others out. But as Angèle was listening and casting sly glances at Lisa, who was handing round some leg of mutton and looking very serious, the parents at first did nothing but sing the young woman’s praises. Moreover, the architect always stood up for the respectability of the house, with the vain conviction of a tenant who seemed to obtain from it a regular certificate of his own gentility.
“Oh! my dear fellow, most respectable people. You saw them at the Josserands’. The husband is no fool; he is full of ideas, he will end by discovering something very grand. As for the wife, she has some style about her, as we artists say.”
Madame Campardon, who had been rather worse since the day before, and who was half reclining, though her illness did not prevent her eating thick underdone slices of meat, languidly murmured in her turn: