“Armand had no fight in him; he looked mighty sorry for himself, but offered no explanations or excuses, beyond saying that the drink had got into his head. Madame Duplessis, on the other hand, was out for scalps—Do you wonder? Fancy that voyage all the way back with a husband worse than drunk. When I say worse than drunk, I mean that this chap wasn’t content to take his booze and carry on as a decent man would have done. No, sir. He embroidered on the business without the slightest thought of his wife. An ordinary man full up with liquor and with a wife towing round would have tried to have hidden his condition as far as he could, but this blighter carried on regardless, and, when the whisky was in, wasn’t to hold or bind.
“Of course she recognised that something in his brain had given way, and she took into account that he was plainly trying to drown the recollection of his cowardice in not helping Charles to escape; all the same she was out for scalps and said so.
“She said she would live with him no more, that she had been a fool to marry a man whom she had only known for a few months and of whose family she knew nothing. She said she would give him an allowance of a thousand francs a month if he would sheer off and get out of her sight and never let her see him again.
“He sat listening to all this without a sign of shame, and when she’d finished he flattened her out by calmly asking for fifteen hundred a month instead of a thousand. Never said he was sorry; just asked for a bigger allowance as if he was talking to a business man he was doing a deal with instead of a wife he had injured and outraged. Even the old lawyer was sick, and it takes a lot to sicken a French lawyer. I can tell you that.
“What does she do? She says: ‘I’ll allow you two thousand a month on the condition I never see your face or hear from you again. If you show yourself before me,’ she says, ‘or write to me, I’ll stop the allowance—if you try to move the law to make us live together, I’ll turn all my money into gold coin and throw it in the sea and myself after it, you beast,’ she says.
“And he says: ‘All right, all right, don’t fly away with things,’ he says. ‘Give me my allowance and you’ll never see me again.’
“Then he signs a paper to that effect, and she leaves him at Marseilles and goes back to Paris to take up her life as if she had never been married.
“Back in Paris she felt as if she’d been through a nightmare. You see she’d loved the chap, that was the bother. And the rum part of the thing was she couldn’t unlove him. That’s to say she couldn’t forget him. She couldn’t forget the man he’d been. Seemed to her as if some frightful accident had turned his nature and that it wasn’t altogether his fault, and she guessed that it wasn’t only his funking his duty that had changed him, but that Charles, away out there in New Caledonia, was haunting him.
“Then, after a while, being a rich woman, she managed, unknown to anyone, to get news of what he was doing and how he was carrying on, and what she found out didn’t comfort her any. He was up in Montmartre with another woman and going to pieces fast, what with living all his time in cafés and drinking and so on. She reckoned she wouldn’t be paying his allowance long, and she was right.
“One day an old woman turned up at her house asking her to come at once to where he was living as he was mortally ill and couldn’t hold out more than a few hours.