"Good heavens!" she cried; "you have neither heart nor soul! Here's sixteen years that I have spent my youth in this house, and I have only just found out that you have got a stone there (striking her breast). For two months you have seen before your eyes that brave captain, a victim of the Bourbons, who was cut out for a general, and is down in the depths of poverty, hunted into a hole of a place where there's no way to make a penny of money! He's forced to sit on a stool all day in the mayor's office to earn—what? Six hundred miserable francs,—a fine thing, indeed! And here are you, with six hundred and fifty-nine thousand well invested, and sixty thousand francs' income, —thanks to me, who never spend more than three thousand a year, everything included, even my own clothes, yes, everything!—and you never think of offering him a home here, though there's the second floor empty! You'd rather the rats and mice ran riot in it than put a human being there,—and he a lad your father always allowed to be his own son! Do you want to know what you are? I'll tell you,—a fratricide! And I know why, too. You see I take an interest in him, and that provokes you. Stupid as you seem, you have got more spite in you than the spitefullest of men. Well, yes! I do take an interest in him, and a keen one—"
"But, Flore—"
"'But, Flore', indeed! What's that got to do with it? You may go and find another Flore (if you can!), for I hope this glass of wine may poison me if I don't get away from your dungeon of a house. I haven't, God be thanked! cost you one penny during the twelve years I've been with you, and you have had the pleasure of my company into the bargain. I could have earned my own living anywhere with the work that I've done here,—washing, ironing, looking after the linen, going to market, cooking, taking care of your interests before everything, slaving myself to death from morning till night,—and this is my reward!"
"But, Flore—"
"Oh, yes, 'Flore'! find another Flore, if you can, at your time of life, fifty-one years old, and getting feeble,—for the way your health is failing is frightful, I know that! and besides, you are none too amusing—"
"But, Flore—"
"Let me alone!"
She went out, slamming the door with a violence that echoed through the house, and seemed to shake it to its foundations. Jean-Jacques softly opened the door and went, still more softly, into the kitchen where she was muttering to herself.
"But, Flore," said the poor sheep, "this is the first time I have heard of this wish of yours; how do you know whether I will agree to it or not?"
"In the first place," she said, "there ought to be a man in the house. Everybody knows you have ten, fifteen, twenty thousand francs here; if they came to rob you we should both be murdered. For my part, I don't care to wake up some fine morning chopped in quarters, as happened to that poor servant-girl who was silly enough to defend her master. Well! if the robbers knew there was a man in the house as brave as Caesar and who wasn't born yesterday,—for Max could swallow three burglars as quick as a flash,—well, then I should sleep easy. People may tell you a lot of stuff,—that I love him, that I adore him,—and some say this and some say that! Do you know what you ought to say? You ought to answer that you know it; that your father told you on his deathbed to take care of his poor Max. That will stop people's tongues; for every stone in Issoudun can tell you he paid Max's schooling—and so! Here's nine years that I have eaten your bread—"