“Well! he is more like Turcaret than I had heard he was!” cried the girl, laughing at this reply, worthy of the many artless speeches for which the banker was famous.
The dishes were so highly spiced as to give the Baron an indigestion, on purpose that he might go home early; so this was all he got in the way of pleasure out of his first evening with Esther. At the theatre he was obliged to drink an immense number of glasses of eau sucree, leaving Esther alone between the acts.
By a coincidence so probable that it can scarcely be called chance, Tullia, Mariette, and Madame du Val-Noble were at the play that evening. Richard Darlington enjoyed a wild success—and a deserved success—such as is seen only in Paris. The men who saw this play all came to the conclusion that a lawful wife might be thrown out of window, and the wives loved to see themselves unjustly persecuted.
The women said to each other: “This is too much! we are driven to it—but it often happens!”
Now a woman as beautiful as Esther, and dressed as Esther was, could not show off with impunity in a stage-box at the Porte-Saint-Martin. And so, during the second act, there was quite a commotion in the box where the two dancers were sitting, caused by the undoubted identity of the unknown fair one with La Torpille.
“Heyday! where has she dropped from?” said Mariette to Madame du Val-Noble. “I thought she was drowned.”
“But is it she? She looks to me thirty-seven times younger and handsomer than she was six years ago.”
“Perhaps she has preserved herself in ice like Madame d’Espard and Madame Zayonchek,” said the Comte de Brambourg, who had brought the three women to the play, to a pit-tier box. “Isn’t she the ‘rat’ you meant to send me to hocus my uncle?” said he, addressing Tullia.
“The very same,” said the singer. “Du Bruel, go down to the stalls and see if it is she.”
“What brass she has got!” exclaimed Madame du Val-Noble, using an expressive but vulgar phrase.