Hearing that name, and remembering the promise Felix had made her to lift her to the skies, which, as he said it, she had fancied a sign of madness, Celeste looked at Madame Thuillier, whose face had taken a sudden glow of animation, and seemed to say to her, “Courage, my child! all is not lost.”
“My dear Theodose,” said Thuillier, “Felix is coming here to-night; you must take him aside and get him to give you a copy of that communication; it would be a fine stroke of fortune for the ‘Echo’ to be the first to publish it.”
“Yes,” said Minard, assuming the answer, “that would do good service to the public, for the affair is going to make a great noise. The committee, not finding Monsieur Picot at home, went straight to the Minister of Public Instruction; and the minister flew to the Tuileries and saw the King; and the ‘Messager’ came out this evening—strange to say, so early that I could read it in my carriage as I drove along—with an announcement that Monsieur Picot is named Chevalier of the Legion of honor, with a pension of eighteen hundred francs from the fund devoted to the encouragement of science and letters.”
“Well,” said Thuillier, “there’s one cross at least well bestowed.”
“But eighteen hundred francs for the pension seems to me rather paltry,” said Dutocq.
“So it does,” said Thuillier, “and all the more because that money comes from the tax-payers; and, when one sees the taxes, as we do, frittered away on court favorites—”
“Eighteen hundred francs a year,” interrupted Minard, “is certainly something, especially for savants, a class of people who are accustomed to live on very little.”
“I think I have heard,” said la Peyrade, “that this very Monsieur Picot leads a strange life, and that his family, who at first wanted to shut him up as a lunatic, are now trying to have guardians appointed over him. They say he allows a servant-woman who keeps his house to rob him of all he has. Parbleu! Thuillier, you know her; it is that woman who came to the office the other day about some money in Dupuis’s hands.”
“Yes, yes, true,” said Thuillier, significantly; “you are right, I do know her.”
“It is queer,” said Brigitte, seeing a chance to enforce the argument she had used to Celeste, “that all these learned men are good for nothing outside of their science; in their homes they have to be treated like children.”