“How is it with you, my dear madame?”
“I, thank heaven, have passed the period; and you?”
“I really hope I have, too!” says your wife.
“You can marry Caroline,” says Adolphe’s mother to your future son-in-law; “Caroline will be the sole heiress of her mother, of her uncle, and her grandfather.”
2.—As to yourself.
You are also the heir of your maternal grandfather, a good old man whose possessions will surely fall to you, for he has grown imbecile, and is therefore incapable of making a will.
You are an amiable man, but you have been very dissipated in your youth. Besides, you are fifty-nine years old, and your head is bald, resembling a bare knee in the middle of a gray wig.
III.—A dowry of three hundred thousand.
IV.—Caroline’s only sister, a little dunce of twelve, a sickly child, who bids fair to fill an early grave.
V.—Your own fortune, father-in-law (in certain kinds of society they say papa father-in-law) yielding an income of twenty thousand, and which will soon be increased by an inheritance.