“You have him safe——”
“My dear, as yet he has only paid my debts.”
“How mean!” cried Suzanne du Val-Noble.
“Oh!” said Esther, “I had debts enough to frighten a minister of finance. Now, I mean to have thirty thousand a year before the first stroke of midnight. Oh! he is excellent, I have nothing to complain of. He does it well.—In a week we give a house-warming; you must come.—That morning he is to make me a present of the lease of the house in the Rue Saint-Georges. In decency, it is impossible to live in such a house on less than thirty thousand francs a year—of my own, so as to have them safe in case of accident. I have known poverty, and I want no more of it. There are certain acquaintances one has had enough of at once.”
“And you, who used to say, ‘My face is my fortune!’—How you have changed!” exclaimed Suzanne.
“It is the air of Switzerland; you grow thrifty there.—Look here; go there yourself, my dear! Catch a Swiss, and you may perhaps catch a husband, for they have not yet learned what such women as we are can be. And, at any rate, you may come back with a passion for investments in the funds—a most respectable and elegant passion!—Good-bye.”
Esther got into her carriage again, a handsome carriage drawn by the finest pair of dappled gray horses at that time to be seen in Paris.
“The woman who is getting into the carriage is handsome,” said Peyrade to Contenson, “but I like the one who is walking best; follow her, and find out who she is.”
“That is what that Englishman has just remarked in English,” said Theodore Gaillard, repeating Peyrade’s remark to Madame du Val-Noble.
Before making this speech in English, Peyrade had uttered a word or two in that language, which had made Theodore look up in a way that convinced him that the journalist understood English.