"Sell something here, madame?" and with a sorrowful look he pointed to his poor chamber, cold and bare.
At this gesture, so cruelly significant, Madelaine cast down her eyes: her heart hardened; then she added, stammering, and pointing to the two gilt frames:
"But those two pictures?" . . .
"Those pictures?" said the Marquis, gravely and tenderly, "that is all that remains to me of my father,—of my mother. . . . Madame, those are their portraits, and for the first time they see their son blush for his poverty." . . .
At these last words, Madelaine compared the interior of her own house, where there was at least comfort, with this cold room, a miserable shelter for a gentleman (for they stall believed in gentlemen at that time); she felt her wrath soften almost to pity, especially when she saw the young Marquis trembling with cold in his wet clothes.
In these violent natures, opposite emotions are near neighbors. Dame Landry, since she left the shop, had been kept in a state of almost frantic irritation; this paroxysm could not last; like all exaggerated feelings, her anger fell flat, so to speak, on the first reflection suggested by her naturally good heart.
The marquis was so handsome, he had met her abuse with a dignity so sad and calm, he appeared to suffer so much with the cold—he who had undoubtedly been reared in the lap of luxury—that the good woman, feeling also the irresistible attraction which this singular personage always exercised, passed almost instantaneously from insult to respect, from harshness to commiseration; she hastily readjusted her head-dress, muttered some unintelligible words, and disappeared, to the great astonishment of the Marquis.
The ex-professor, who had no doubt been waiting the result of this conversation to come out of his den, partly pushed open the door of the little room, and said:
"So this miserable harpy has gone? Pardon me—but I basely fled before the enemy" . . .
"You were there, my good Dominique? . . . Well, you have heard . . . Good Heavens!—what humiliation! To seem to this woman a man of bad faith! Ah, this is horrible . . . Dominique, I am resolved . . . if my uncle does not come, I will enlist . . . I will pay this cursed debt with the price of my enlistment . . . at least I shall no longer have to blush . . ."