“Hey! ain’t they pretty? They must have cost a good bit!”
“Jean! don’t make so much noise!” called Monsieur Bernard from his daughter’s room.
“Did you hear that?” whispered Nepomucene to Godefroid. “He’s cracked, for sure, that old fellow.”
“You don’t know what you may be at his age.”
“Yes, I do know,” responded Nepomucene, “I shall be in the sugar-bowl.”
“The sugar-bowl?”
“Yes, they’ll have made my bones into charcoal by that time; I often see the carts of the refineries coming to Montsouris for charcoal; they tell me they make sugar of it.” And he departed after another load of wood, satisfied with this philosophical reflection.
Godefroid discreetly withdrew to his own rooms, closing Monsieur Bernard’s door behind him. Madame Vauthier, who during this time had been preparing her new lodger’s breakfast, now came up to serve it, attended by Felicite. Godefroid, lost in reflection, stared into his fire. He was absorbed in meditation on this great misery which contained so many different miseries, and yet within which he could see the ineffable joys of the many triumphs of paternal and filial love; they were gems shining in the blackness of the pit.
“What romances, even those that are most famous, can equal such realities?” he thought. “What a life it will be to relieve the burden of such existences, to seek out causes and effects and remedy them, calming sorrows, helping good; to incarnate one’s own being in misery; to familiarize one’s self with homes like that; to act out constantly in life those dramas which move us so in fiction! I never imagined that good could be more interesting, more piquant than vice.”
“Is monsieur satisfied with his breakfast?” asked Madame Vauthier, who now, with Felicite’s assistance, brought the table close to Godefroid.