"All the same, you were free!"
This allusion to the facility with which the intrigue between them had been carried on hurt Madame Dambreuse.
"Ah! you don't know the services that I did for him, or the misery in which I lived!"
"What!"
"Why, certainly! Was it a safe thing to have always near him that bastard, a daughter, whom he introduced into the house at the end of five years of married life, and who, were it not for me, might have led him into some act of folly?"
Then she explained how her affairs stood. The arrangement on the occasion of her marriage was that the property of each party should be separate.[I] The amount of her inheritance was three hundred thousand francs. M. Dambreuse had guaranteed by the marriage contract that in the event of her surviving him, she should have an income of fifteen thousand francs a year, together with the ownership of the mansion. But a short time afterwards he had made a will by which he gave her all he possessed, and this she estimated, so far as it was possible to ascertain just at present, at over three millions.
Frederick opened his eyes widely.
"It was worth the trouble, wasn't it? However, I contributed to it! It was my own property I was protecting; Cécile would have unjustly robbed me of it."
"Why did she not come to see her father?"
As he asked her this question Madame Dambreuse eyed him attentively; then, in a dry tone: