What was I going to do? I did not stop to reason, I only wanted to find her, and I would. I went a few steps without reflecting, but then I suddenly thought to myself. "Supposing I should go into the uncle's room, what should I say?...." And I stood still, with my head a void, and my heart beating. But in a few moments, I thought of an answer: "Of course, I shall say that I am looking for Rivet's room, to speak to him about an important matter, and I began to inspect all the doors, trying to find hers, and at last I took hold of a handle at a venture, turned it and went in ... there was Henriette, sitting on her bed and looking at me in tears. So I gently turned the key, and going up to her on tip-toe, I said: "I forgot to ask you for something to read, Mademoiselle." She struggled and resisted, but I soon opened the book I was looking for. I will not tell you its title, but it is the most wonderful of romances, the most divine of poems. And when once I had turned the first page, she let me turn over as many leaves as I liked, and I got through so many chapters that our candles were quite burnt out. Then, after thanking her, I was stealthily returning to my room, when a rough hand seized me, and a voice, it was Rivet's, whispered in my ear: 'So you have not yet quite settled that affair of Morin's?'"
At seven o'clock the next morning, she herself brought me a cup of chocolate. I have never drunk anything like it, soft, velvety, perfumed, delicious. I could scarcely take my lips away from the cup, and she had hardly left the room when Rivet came in. He seemed nervous and irritable, like a man who had not slept, and he said to me crossly: "If you go on like this, you will end by spoiling the affair of that pig of a Morin!"
At eight o'clock the aunt arrived. Our discussion was very short, for they withdrew their complaint, and I left five hundred francs for the poor of the town. They wanted to keep us for the day, and they arranged an excursion to go and see some ruins. Henriette made signs to me to stay, behind her parents' back, and I accepted, but Rivet was determined to go, and though I took him aside, and begged and prayed him to do this for me, he appeared quite exasperated and kept saying to me: "I have had enough of that pig Morin's affair, do you hear?"
Of course I was obliged to go also, and it was one of the hardest moments of my life. I could have gone on arranging that business as long as I lived, and when we were in the railway carriage, after shaking hands with her in silence, I said to Rivet: "You are a mere brute!" And he replied: "My dear fellow, you were beginning to excite me confoundedly."
On getting to the Fanal office, I saw a crowd waiting for us, and as soon as they saw us they all exclaimed: "Well, have you settled the affair of that pig of a Morin?" All La Rochelle was excited about it, and Rivet, who had got over his ill-humor on the journey, had great difficulty in keeping himself from laughing as he said: "Yes, we have managed it, thanks to Labarbe." And we went to Morin's.
He was sitting in an easy chair, with mustard plasters on his legs, and cold bandages on his head, nearly dead with misery. He was coughing with the short cough of a dying man, without any one knowing how he had caught it, and his wife looked at him like a tigress ready to eat him, and as soon as he saw us he trembled so violently as to make his hands and knees shake, so I said to him immediately: "It is all settled, you dirty scamp, but don't do such a thing again."
He got up, choking, took my hands and kissed them as if they had belonged to a prince, cried, nearly fainted, embraced Rivet and even kissed Madame Morin, who gave him such a push as to send him staggering back into his chair, but he never got over the blow: his mind had been too much upset. In all the country round, moreover, he was called nothing but, "that pig of a Morin," and that epithet went through him like a sword thrust every time he heard it. When a street boy called after him: "Pig!" he turned his head instinctively. His friends also overwhelmed him with horrible jokes, and used to ask him, whenever they were eating ham: "It's a bit of you?" He died two years later.
As for myself, when I was a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in 1875, I called on the new notary at Fouserre, Monsieur Belloncle, to solicit his vote, and a tall, handsome and evidently wealthy lady received me. "You do not know me again?" she said. And I stammered out: "But ... no Madame." "Henriette Bonnel." "Ah!" And I felt myself turning pale, while she seemed perfectly at her ease, and looked at me with a smile.
As soon as she had left me alone with her husband, he took both my hands, and squeezing them as if he meant to crush them, he said: "I have been intending to go and see you for a long time, my dear sir, for my wife has very often talked to me about you. I know ... yes, I know under what painful circumstances you made her acquaintance, and I know also how perfectly you behaved, how full of delicacy, tact and devotion you showed yourself in the affair...." He hesitated, and then said in a lower tone, as if he had been saying something low and coarse.... "In the affair of that pig of a Morin."