"Go and pay the money in where it will be safe—run, fly; I will not admit you again without the receipt in your hand. Go, as fast and soon as you can!"
She pushed Crevel out of the room by the shoulders, seeing avarice blossoming in his face once more. When she heard the outer door shut, she exclaimed:
"Then Lisbeth is revenged over and over again! What a pity that she is at her old Marshal's now! We would have had a good laugh! So that old woman wants to take the bread out of my mouth. I will startle her a little!"
Marshal Hulot, being obliged to live in a style suited to the highest military rank, had taken a handsome house in the Rue du Mont-Parnasse, where there are three or four princely residences. Though he rented the whole house, he inhabited only the ground floor. When Lisbeth went to keep house for him, she at once wished to let the first floor, which, as she said, would pay the whole rent, so that the Count would live almost rent-free; but the old soldier would not hear of it.
For some months past the Marshal had had many sad thoughts. He had guessed how miserably poor his sister-in-law was, and suspected her griefs without understanding their cause. The old man, so cheerful in his deafness, became taciturn; he could not help thinking that his house would one day be a refuge for the Baroness and her daughter; and it was for them that he kept the first floor. The smallness of his fortune was so well known at headquarters, that the War Minister, the Prince de Wissembourg, begged his old comrade to accept a sum of money for his household expenses. This sum the Marshal spent in furnishing the ground floor, which was in every way suitable; for, as he said, he would not accept the Marshal's baton to walk the streets with.
The house had belonged to a senator under the Empire, and the ground floor drawing-rooms had been very magnificently fitted with carved wood, white-and-gold, still in very good preservation. The Marshal had found some good old furniture in the same style; in the coach-house he had a carriage with two batons in saltire on the panels; and when he was expected to appear in full fig, at the Minister's, at the Tuileries, for some ceremony or high festival, he hired horses for the job.
His servant for more than thirty years was an old soldier of sixty, whose sister was the cook, so he had saved ten thousand francs, adding it by degrees to a little hoard he intended for Hortense. Every day the old man walked along the boulevard, from the Rue du Mont-Parnasse to the Rue Plumet; and every pensioner as he passed stood at attention, without fail, to salute him: then the Marshal rewarded the veteran with a smile.
"Who is the man you always stand at attention to salute?" said a young workman one day to an old captain and pensioner.
"I will tell you, boy," replied the officer.
The "boy" stood resigned, as a man does to listen to an old gossip.