'You are quite mistaken. She is a good girl, and I shall be very glad when she is able to come downstairs again and eat her soup beside me.'
'We shall all be glad,' cried his wife, with considerable bitterness. 'We may speak and say what we think, without ceasing to be fond of those of whom we talk.'
'The poor little dear!' exclaimed Louise, in her turn; 'I should be very glad to bear half the pain for her, if such a thing were possible. She is so amiable!'
Véronique, who was just bringing them their candles, once more put in her word.
'You are quite right to be her friend, Mademoiselle Louise, for no one, unless she had a paving-stone for a heart, could ever wish her unkindly.'
'That will do,' said Madame Chanteau. 'We didn't ask for your opinion. It would be very much better if you cleaned the candlesticks. This one here is quite filthy.'
They all rose from their seats. Chanteau lost no time in escaping from his wife's snappishness, and shut himself up in his room on the ground floor. But when the two women reached the landing upstairs, where their rooms adjoined each other, they did not at once go to bed. Madame Chanteau almost always took Louise into her own room for a little time and there resumed her remarks about Lazare, showing the girl one and another portrait of him, and even exhibiting little memorials and souvenirs, such as a tooth which had been extracted when he was quite young, or a look of the pale hair of his infancy, or even some of his old clothes; for instance, the bow he had worn at his first communion, or his first pair of trousers.
'See!' she said, one night, 'these are some locks of his hair. I have a number, cut at all stages of his life.'
Thus, when Louise got to bed she could not sleep for thinking of the young man whom his mother was trying to force on her.