“Go into the bedroom,” said the journalist to his mistress; “I will soon get rid of him. He is one of my most intimate friends, and I shall have to explain to him my new start in life.”
“Oh, ho! dinner for two, and a blue velvet bonnet!” cried Bixiou. “I am off.—Ah! that is what comes of marrying—one must go through some partings. How rich one feels when one begins to move one’s sticks, heh?”
“Who talks of marrying?” said Lousteau.
“What! are you not going to be married, then?” cried Bixiou.
“No!”
“No? My word, what next? Are you making a fool of yourself, if you please?—What!—You, who, by the mercy of Heaven, have come across twenty thousand francs a year, and a house, and a wife connected with all the first families of the better middle class—a wife, in short, out of the Rue des Lombards—”
“That will do, Bixiou, enough; it is at an end. Be off!”
“Be off? I have a friend’s privileges, and I shall take every advantage of them.—What has come over you?”
“What has ‘come over’ me is my lady from Sancerre. She is a mother, and we are going to live together happily to the end of our days.—You would have heard it to-morrow, so you may as well be told it now.”
“Many chimney-pots are falling on my head, as Arnal says. But if this woman really loves you, my dear fellow, she will go back to the place she came from. Did any provincial woman ever yet find her sea-legs in Paris? She will wound all your vanities. Have you forgotten what a provincial is? She will bore you as much when she is happy as when she is sad; she will have as great a talent for escaping grace as a Parisian has in inventing it.