“Worthy Madame Florent—”
“You said the Rocher de Cancale.—Were you at the Florents’?”
“Yes, at their house; I made a mistake.”
“You did not take a coach to come home?”
“No.”
“And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?”
“Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way.”
“It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!” said Hortense, looking at her husband’s patent leather boots.
It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled.
“Here—here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me,” said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination.