As he threatened to dismiss her, she exclaimed:
'You had better! I've been in your service for five-and-twenty years. If I went madame would go with me!'
Marthe, reduced to extremities and egged on by Rose and Olympe, at last rebelled. She was desperately in want of five hundred francs. For the last week Olympe had been crying and sobbing, asserting that if she could not get five hundred francs by the end of the month one of the bills which had been endorsed by Abbé Faujas would be published in one of the Plassans newspapers. The threatened publication of this bill, this terrible threat which she did not quite understand, threw Marthe into a state of dreadful alarm, and she resolved to dare everything. In the evening, as they were going to bed, she asked Mouret for the five hundred francs, and when he looked at her in amazement she began to speak of the fifteen years which she had spent behind a counter at Marseilles, with a pen behind her ear like a clerk.
'We made the money together,' she said; 'and it belongs to us both. I want five hundred francs.'
Mouret thereupon broke his long maintained silence in the most violent fashion, and all his old raillery burst forth again.
'Five hundred francs!' he cried. 'Do you want them for your priest? I play the simpleton now and keep my peace for fear I might say too much; but you must not imagine that you can go on for ever making a fool of me! Five hundred francs! Why not say the whole house? The whole house certainly does seem to belong to him! He wants some money, does he? And he has told you to ask me for it? I might be among a lot of robbers in a wood instead of being in my own home! I shall have my very handkerchief stolen out of my pocket before long! I'll be bound that if I were to go and search his room I should find his drawers full of my property. There are seven pairs of my socks missing, four or five shirts, and three pairs of pants. I was going over the things yesterday. Everything I have is disappearing, and I shan't have anything left very soon! No, not a single sou will I give you, not a single sou!'
'I want five hundred francs; half of the money belongs to me,' Marthe tranquilly replied.
For a whole hour Mouret stormed and fumed and repeated the same reproaches. His wife was no longer the same, he said. He did not know her now. Before the priest's arrival, she had loved him and obeyed him and looked after the house. Those who set her to act in opposition to him must be very wicked persons. Then his voice grew thick, and he let himself fall into a chair, broken down and as weak as a child.
'Give me the key of your desk!' said Marthe.
He got up from his chair and gathered his strength together for a last cry of protest.