“But you will tell me, old wretch?”
“Yes, yes. Then I can wait eight months, for I have discovered a little angel, a good child, an innocent thing not old enough to be depraved.”
“Do not forget the police-court,” said Lisbeth, who flattered herself that she would some day see Hulot there.
“No.—It is in the Rue de Charonne,” said the Baron, “a part of the town where no fuss is made about anything. No one will ever find me there. I am called Pere Thorec, Lisbeth, and I shall be taken for a retired cabinet-maker; the girl is fond of me, and I will not allow my back to be shorn any more.”
“No, that has been done,” said Lisbeth, looking at his coat. “Supposing I take you there.”
Baron Hulot got into the coach, deserting Mademoiselle Elodie without taking leave of her, as he might have tossed aside a novel he had finished.
In half an hour, during which Baron Hulot talked to Lisbeth of nothing but little Atala Judici—for he had fallen by degrees to those base passions that ruin old men—she set him down with two thousand francs in his pocket, in the Rue de Charonne, Faubourg Saint-Antoine, at the door of a doubtful and sinister-looking house.
“Good-day, cousin; so now you are to be called Thorec, I suppose? Send none but commissionaires if you need me, and always take them from different parts.”
“Trust me! Oh, I am really very lucky!” said the Baron, his face beaming with the prospect of new and future happiness.
“No one can find him there,” said Lisbeth; and she paid the coach at the Boulevard Beaumarchais, and returned to the Rue Louis-le-Grand in the omnibus.