Birotteau’s joy is not to be described; he threw himself into his uncle’s arms, weeping.
“May he not wear his cross?” said Ragon to the Abbe Loraux.
The confessor fastened the red ribbon to Cesar’s buttonhole. The poor clerk looked at himself again and again during the evening in the mirrors of the salon, manifesting a joy at which people thinking themselves superior might have laughed, but which these good bourgeois thought quite natural.
The next day Birotteau went to find Madame Madou.
“Ah, there you are, good soul!” she cried. “I didn’t recognize you, you have turned so gray. Yet you don’t really drudge, you people; you’ve got good places. As for me, I work like a turnspit that deserves baptism.”
“But, madame—”
“Never mind, I don’t mean it as a reproach,” she said. “You have got my receipt.”
“I came to tell you that I shall pay you to-morrow, at Monsieur Crottat’s, the rest of your claim in full, with interest.”
“Is that true?”
“Be there at eleven o’clock.”