“You may be right about Madame Sarcus; she doesn’t paint before the glass,” retorted Rigou, who was always disgusted by the exhibition of the Cochet’s ancient charms.
Madame Soudry, who thought she used only a “suspicion” of rouge, did not perceive the sarcasm and hastened to say:—
“Is it possible that women paint?”
“Now, Lupin,” said Rigou, without replying to this naivete, “go over to Gaubertin’s to-morrow morning. Tell him that my fellow-mayor and I” (striking Soudry on the thigh) “will break bread with him at breakfast somewhere about midday. Tell him everything, so that we may all have thought it over before we meet, for now’s the time to make an end of that damned Shopman. As I drove over here I came to the conclusion it would be best to get up a quarrel between the courts and him, so that the Keeper of the Seals would be wary of making the changes he may ask in their members.”
“Bravo for the son of the Church!” cried Lupin, slapping Rigou on the shoulder.
Madame Soudry was here struck by an idea which could come only to a former waiting-maid of an Opera divinity.
“If,” she said, “one could only get the Shopman to the fete at Soulanges, and throw some fine girl in his way who would turn his head, we could easily set his wife against him by letting her know that the son of an upholsterer has gone back to the style of his early loves.”
“Ah, my beauty!” said Soudry, “you have more sense in your head than the Prefecture of police in Paris.”
“That’s an idea which proves that Madame reigns by mind as well as by beauty,” said Lupin, who was rewarded by a grimace which the leading society of Soulanges were in the habit of accepting without protest for a smile.
“One might do better still,” said Rigou, after some thought; “if we could only turn it into a downright scandal.”