The idea of selling Les Peuples and leaving the house where she had passed all her life threw Jeanne into a state of extreme agitation, and she lay awake the whole night. "I shall never be able to go away from here," she said, when Rosalie came into the room next morning.
"You'll have to, all the same, madame," answered the maid with rising temper. "The lawyer is coming presently with the man who wants to buy the château, and, if you don't sell it, you won't have a blade of grass to call your own in four years' time."
"Oh, I cannot! I cannot!" moaned Jeanne.
But an hour afterwards came a letter from Paul asking for ten thousand francs. What was to be done? Jeanne did not know, and, in her distress, she consulted Rosalie, who shrugged her shoulders, and observed:
"What did I tell you, madame? Oh, you'd both of you have been in a nice muddle if I hadn't come back."
Then, by her advice, Jeanne wrote back:
"My Dear Son: I cannot help you any more; you have ruined me, and I am even obliged to sell Les Peuples. But I shall always have a home for you whenever you choose to return to your poor old mother, who has suffered so cruelly through you.
Jeanne."
The lawyer came with M. Jeoffrin, who was a retired sugar baker, and Jeanne herself received them, and invited them to go all over the house and grounds. Then a month after this visit, she signed the deed of sale, and bought, at the same time, a little villa in the hamlet of Batteville, standing on the Montivilliers high-road, near Goderville.
After she had signed the deeds she went out to the baroness's avenue, and walked up and down, heart-broken and miserable while she bade tearful, despairing farewells to the trees, the worm-eaten bench under the plane tree, the wood, the old elm trunk, against which she had leant so many times, and the hillock, where she had so often sat, and whence she had watched the Comte de Fourville running towards the sea on the awful day of Julien's death. She stayed out until the evening, and at last Rosalie went to look for her and brought her in. A tall peasant of about twenty-five was waiting at the door. He greeted Jeanne in a friendly way, as if he had known her a long while: