“Your opinions, your sympathies, your whole attitude. I don’t approve of it—je le constate. You’ve withdrawn your confidence from the people; you’ve said things on this spot, where you stand now, that have given pain to my wife and me.”
“If we didn’t love you we should say you had madly betrayed us!”—she quickly took her husband’s idea.
“Oh I shall never madly betray you,” Hyacinth rather languidly smiled.
“You’ll never hand us over—of course you think so. But you’ve no right to act for the people when you’ve ceased to believe in the people. Il faut être conséquent, nom de Dieu!” Poupin went on.
“You’ll give up all thoughts of acting for me—je ne permets pas ça!” grandly added his wife.
“The thing’s probably not of importance—only a little word of consideration,” Schinkel suggested soothingly.
“We repudiate you, we deny you, we denounce you!” shouted Poupin with magnificent heat.
“My poor friends, it’s you who have broken down, not I,” said Hyacinth. “I’m much obliged to you for your solicitude, but the inconsequence is yours. At all events good-night.”
He turned away from them and was leaving the room when Madame Poupin threw herself upon him as her husband had done a moment before, but in silence and with an extraordinary force of passion and distress. Being stout and powerful she quickly got the better of him and pressed him to her ample bosom in a long, dumb embrace.
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” he said as soon as he could speak. “It’s for me to judge of my convictions.”