"That's me," he replied.
Then Denise blushed deeply and stammered: "Oh, I'm so pleased! I am Denise. This is Jean, and this is Pépé. You see, we have come, uncle."
Baudu seemed lost in amazement. His big eyes rolled in his yellow face; he spoke slowly and with difficulty. He had evidently been far from thinking of this family which now suddenly dropped down upon him.
"What—what, you here?" he several times repeated. "But you were at Valognes. Why aren't you at Valognes?"
In her sweet but rather faltering voice she then explained that since the death of her father, who had spent every penny he possessed in his dye-works, she had acted as a mother to the two children; but the little she had earned at Cornaille's did not suffice to keep the three of them. Jean certainly worked at a cabinet-maker's, a repairer of old furniture, but didn't earn a sou. Still, he had got to like the business, and had even learned to carve. One day, having found a piece of ivory, he had amused himself by carving it into a head, which a gentleman staying in the town had seen and praised; and this gentleman it was who had been the cause of their leaving Valognes, as he had found Jean a place with an ivory-carver in Paris.
"So you see, uncle," continued Denise, "Jean will commence his apprenticeship at his new master's to-morrow. They ask no premium, and will board and lodge him. And so I felt sure that Pépé and I would be able to jog along. At all events we can't be worse off than we were at Valognes."
She said nothing about a certain love affair of Jean's, of certain letters which he had written to the daughter of a nobleman of the town, of the kisses which the pair had exchanged over a wall—in fact, quite a scandal which had strengthened her in her determination to leave. And if she was so anxious to be in Paris herself it was that she might be able to look after her brother, feeling, as she did, quite a mother's tender anxiety for this gay and handsome youth, whom all the women adored. Uncle Baudu, however, couldn't get over it, but continued his questions.
"So your father left you nothing," said he. "I certainly thought there was still something left. Ah! how many times did I write advising him not to take those dye-works! He was a good-hearted fellow certainly, but he had no head for business And you were left with those two youngsters to look after—you've had to keep them, eh?"
His bilious face had now become clearer, his eyes were not so bloodshot as when he had stood glaring at The Ladies' Paradise. All at once he noticed that he was blocking up the doorway. "Well," said he, "come in, now you're here. Come in, that'll be better than gaping at a parcel of rubbish."
And after addressing a last pout of anger to The Ladies' Paradise, he made way for the children by entering the shop and calling his wife and daughter: "Elizabeth, Geneviève, come down; here's company for you!"