As he marched with short, determined steps through the streets of Tours, M. Bourget flung back his head, advanced an aggressive chest, swelled, and assumed what he felt to be the grand air. Passing in front of a photographer’s shop, it seemed like a response to behold Poissy in all its delicate beauty looking serenely at him from out of a collection of Touraine châteaux.
“Aha, see there!” he cried, rubbing his hands in delighted apostrophe. “And to think that the day is come when Nathalie may, if I but say the word, step into its walls, and hold up her head with the proudest of them. She shall be painted, too, and by the best painter in France, so as to hang with the others in the picture-gallery—Nathalie de Beaudrillart, née Bourget, my child.”
The man’s whole figure was transformed, his round red face, garnished with thick iron-grey eyebrows, gleamed with pride and exultation, and at this moment, although it pleased him to profess that the overture he had received was still under consideration, worse sins than any which he had heard laid to the charge of Léon de Beaudrillart would assuredly have been condoned.
The matter, therefore, went on apace. To the elder people the preliminaries were the most important part, and Mme. de Beaudrillart, although she found it a bitter draught to swallow, had long desired that her son’s romantic notions should give way to what she called reason. Here was reason, plain, bourgeois, moneyed reason, and there was no excuse for falling foul of it. Such a dowry as Nathalie would bring was sufficient to wipe off the debt to M. de Cadanet, and to replace the owner of Poissy in his old position. And, after all, when a man marries a woman, Mme. de Beaudrillart argued, it is she who is raised, not he who is dragged down. King Cophetua’s beggar-girl became a queen, and the Bourget would be merged in the De Beaudrillarts.
She said this to her son, and he smiled.
“With all my heart, though you may find it difficult to efface my future father-in-law.”
Mme. de Beaudrillart shuddered.
“I imagine that he can be made to understand the situation.”
“He would tell you that he understood it perfectly. If you could look into his ledger, I am convinced that you would find on one page an entry of value received, title, position, what you like, and on the opposite the purchase-money, so many hundred thousand francs. But he will see that he gets what he pays for.”
“You mean he will expect to come here!”