“What, Astaroth?” said Madame Fontaine.
“Yes, that batrachian, that toad, to come down to his right name. It seems he nearly killed a woman who was pregnant—”
“Well, well,” interrupted the sorceress, “if I am to tell fortunes alone, you might as well guillotine me at once. Because a fool of a woman lay-in with a dead child, must toads be suppressed in nature? Why did God make them?”
“My dear woman,” said the chief, “did you never hear that in 1617 a learned man was put to death for having a toad in a bottle?”
“Yes, I know that; but we are not in those light ages,” replied Madame Fontaine, facetiously.
“As for you, Madame Nourrisson, the complaint is that you gather your fruit unripe. You ought to know by this time the laws and regulations, and I warn you that everything under twenty-one years of age is forbidden. I wonder I have to remind you of it. Now, aunt, what I have to say to you is confidential.”
Thus dismissed, two of the Fates departed.
Since the days when Jacques Collin had abdicated his former kingship and had made himself, as they say, a new skin in the police force, Jacqueline Collin, though she had never put herself within reach of the law, had certainly never donned the robe of innocence. But having attained, like her nephew, to what might fairly be called opulence, she kept at a safe and respectful distance from the Penal Code, and under cover of an agency that was fairly avowable, she sheltered practices more or less shady, on which she continued to bestow an intelligence and an activity that were really infernal.
“Aunt,” said Vautrin, “I have so many things to say to you that I don’t know where to begin.”
“I should think so! It is a week since I’ve seen you.”