"I mean, Citizen Desmarais, that my former employer has sold me his establishment. Whence it follows that my labors and the care of my forge will oblige me, as well as my wife, to live elsewhere than here with you. I have, in consequence, hired the house previously occupied by my old master, and this very night my wife and I shall take possession of our new abode. The question has been considered and settled."
"Aye, father," added Charlotte. "Such is, indeed, our firm resolution."
At these words, pronounced by John Lebrenn and Charlotte in a voice that admitted of no reply, advocate Desmarais turned livid with rage and amazement. Forgetting now all his tricks of dissimulation, distracted with fear, and exasperated by what he took as an indignity on the part of his daughter and her husband, the lawyer cried to Charlotte, as he shook with anger and fright:
"Treason! Shameful treason! Heartless, unnatural daughter! This is the gratitude with which you repay my bounties to you? You would have the audacity to leave your father's house, would you! And you——" he added, turning tempestuously upon John Lebrenn, "and you, traitor, how dare you thus abuse my confidence, my generosity?"
"Not another word in that tone, Citizen Desmarais," interposed John. "Do not oblige me to forget the respect I owe the father of my wife; do not oblige me to tell you for what reasons your daughter—and her mother—have resolved to fix their abode elsewhere than with you."
"My wife! She also—would dare——" cried the lawyer, his rage redoubling till it almost choked him.
"Yes, monsieur, I also wish to leave you," replied Madam Desmarais. "You have treated me most cruelly, because my unhappy brother, a proscript and a fugitive, came to ask of you a few hours' shelter. You denounced me to the commissioner of our Section, adjured him to hale me away as a prisoner. You have even gone so far as to declare to me, 'If it were necessary, madam, in order to save my life, to send you to the scaffold—I would not hesitate an instant. Just now I must roar with the tigers; but then I should become a tiger.'"
"Hold your tongue!" shrieked the advocate, in a frenzy. "Do you wish to get my head cut off, gabbling like that before this man who perhaps awaits but the moment to settle me? Serpent that he is, whom I have warmed in my bosom!"
"Citizen Desmarais," replied Lebrenn, half in pity, half in disgust, "it depends upon you alone to put an end to your alarms, to the terrors by which you are assailed and of which those about you are the first victims. Cease to display in exaggerated form opinions which are at fisticuffs with your real belief. Renounce your public career. The weakness of your character, the uneasiness of your conscience, evoke fantasms before your eyes."
"It is a plot against my life!" continued Desmarais wildly. "They want to draw upon my head the fury of the Jacobins, and have me packed off to the scaffold. They want to be rid of me so that my dutiful daughter and son-in-law may play ducks and drakes with my fortune! But the old fox knows the trap! I shall stay at the Convention. My daughter and son-in-law may take themselves off, if they so wish; but as for you, Citizeness Desmarais, you shall not leave this house. The wife, according to the law, is bound to reside at the home of her husband."