“Jules, if you had only seen Monsieur Mouret carry it in his arms. Ah well! it did not take long!”
Pichon again uttered his thanks. He was tall and thin, with a doleful look about him, already subdued to the routine of office life, his dull eyes full of the apathetic resignation displayed by circus horses.
“Pray say no more about it!” Octave ended by observing, “it is really not worth while. Madame, your coffee is exquisite. I have never drunk any like it.”
She blushed again, and so much that her hands even became quite rosy.
“Do not spoil her, sir,” said Monsieur Vuillaume gravely, “Her coffee is good, but there is better. And you see how proud she has become at once!”
“Pride is worth nothing,” declared Madame Vuillaume. “We have always taught her to be modest.”
They were both of them little and dried up, very old, and with dark-looking countenances; the wife wore a tight black dress, and the husband a thin frock-coat, on which only the mark of a big red ribbon was to be seen.
“Sir,” resumed the latter, “I was decorated at the age of sixty, on the day I was pensioned off, after having been for thirty-nine years employed at the Ministry of Public Instruction. Well! sir, on that day I dined the same as on other days, and did not let pride interfere with any of my habits. The Cross was due to me, I knew it. I was simply filled with gratitude.” His life was perfectly clear, he wished every one to know it. After twenty-five years’ service, he had been promoted to four thousand francs. His pension, therefore, was two thousand. But he had had to re-engage himself in a subordinate position at fifteen hundred francs, as they had had their little Marie late in life when Madame Vuillaume was no longer expecting either son or daughter. Now that the child was established in life, they were living on the pension, by pinching themselves, in the Rue Durantin at Montmartre, where things were cheaper.
“I am sixty-three,” said he, in conclusion, “and that is all about it, and that is all about it, son-in-law!”
Pichon looked at him in a silent and weary way, his eyes fixed on his red ribbon. Yes, it would be his own story if luck favoured him. He was the last born of a greengrocer who had spent the entire worth of her shop in her anxiety to make her son take a degree, just because all the neighbourhood said he was very intelligent; and she had died bankrupt eight days before his triumph at the Sorbonne. After three years of hardships at his uncle’s, he had had the unexpected luck of getting a berth at the Ministry, which was to lead him to everything, and on the strength of which he had already married.