“But, my dear Albert—”
The other waved his cigar.
“Not a word. If you had not unfortunately known me from my cradle, and basely traded upon that privilege, I should never have been saddled with a preposterously hopeless muddle, out of which there is nothing to be got but discomfiture.”
“When you have seen Madame Léon—”
“Madame Léon!” The young man uttered a smothered roar. “Out upon you! It is a few well-applied tears, is it, which has set you to pester your friends?”
“No, mocker! Madame Léon is a woman who acts, and does not weep. But you must see her, if only to give her confidence; for, unluckily, I pointed you out to her as she drove to the hotel to-day, and she took you for a boy.”
Maître Barraud was an excellent fellow, but his weakness was vanity.
“A boy!” he repeated, in a nettled voice. “A boy! I should like her to know—Well, what is all this about? Of course I must see the woman in order to scrape together a few materials upon which to string as many words as there are onions on the stick a Breton carries over his shoulder. And I know what I shall get out of the interview: protestations, and exclamations, and maunderings about false accusations, and an ill-used angel of a husband, and all the lot of it. Peste! a woman at the back of a case is the very devil!”
“Some day, my dear friend, Madame Barraud will have her revenge.”
“Heaven forbid! At any rate, her charming figure has not yet presented itself upon the horizon. Here is the Opéra, and now I presume I shall be left in peace. Take with you my assurance that your client will be condemned to a fine and a year’s imprisonment. He will get off with that because it was six years ago, and our juries, bless them! have a sneaking sympathy for the follies of youth.”