“Don’t be alarmed, my dear, a judge is likely to know how to grant what is due to justice and—” he puts on a shrewd look here—“to beauty.”
“But, sir—”
“Be quite at your ease,” he adds, holding her hand closely in his, “and we’ll try to reduce this great crime down to a peccadillo.” And he goes to the door with Caroline, who is frightened to death at an appointment thus proposed.
The syndic is a lively young man, and he receives Madame Adolphe with a smile. He smiles at everything, and he smiles as he takes her round the waist with an agility which leaves Caroline no time to resist, especially as she says to herself, “Adolphe particularly recommended me not to vex the syndic.”
Nevertheless Caroline escapes, in the interest of the syndic himself, and again pronounces the “Sir!” which she had said three times to the judge.
“Don’t be angry with me, you are irresistible, you are an angel, and your husband is a monster: for what does he mean by sending a siren to a young man whom he knows to be inflammable!”
“Sir, my husband could not come himself; he is in bed, very sick, and you threatened him so terribly that the urgency of the matter—”
“Hasn’t he got a lawyer, an attorney?”
Caroline is terrified by this remark which reveals Adolphe’s profound rascality.
“He supposed, sir, that you would have pity upon the mother of a family, upon her children—”