"You tire me with your Julie!" cried Monsieur Antoine. "She deserves a great deal of pity, doesn't she, when I am giving her everything—fortune, social consideration and liberty!"
"Yes, liberty to die of grief!"
"As if people died of that! Pretty twaddle in a lawyer's mouth! Let her make a good marriage suited to her rank, I won't oppose it; she can marry anyone she chooses. I bar nobody but the dauber. Within a fortnight she will open her eyes and thank me. She will recognize my grandeur of soul and will call me her benefactor. Upon my word, you are all cracked! I pull hundreds of thousands of francs from my pocket; I throw them by the handful to ingrates and fools, and they call me cruel kinsman, hard heart, old hound, old miser and God knows what! The world is upside down just now, on my word!"
"They won't call you all those names, uncle; they won't call you any name. There are no names to describe the oddity of your character, and nobody else in the world could have discovered the secret of causing the hand that enriches to be cursed!"
"Bah! you are using big words; you fancy you're at the bar! Off with you, you bore me to death. Tell your Julien whatever you choose; I don't want to see him or you or anybody. I am going back to the country."
"That is to say that you will shut yourself up here and barricade yourself against all the strong arguments I can bring forward."
"Possibly! now you know that your strong arguments will be wasted; they will stay at the door."
Marcel was careful not to tell his uncle that there was a much simpler and less expensive way to prevent the marriage: namely, to abandon Madame d'Estrelle to her destruction, and trust to the wise and generous reflections to which she had opened her mind. Nor did he feel called upon to tell him that she refused his gifts.
"After all," he thought, "who knows how long this passion will last? In a short time, perhaps, Julie will have conquered it, and then it will be very agreeable to her to know that she is free and still rich."
He and Monsieur Antoine drew up a conditional discharge of the whole of her debt, and he succeeded in procuring the insertion of this important modification, that Madame d'Estrelle was at liberty to enter into wedlock with anyone she chose except an untitled person. He procured Monsieur Antoine's signature and seal to the document, and put it in his pocket, pending an opportune time to hand it to Madame d'Estrelle, that is to say, when she should be less agitated.