Mme. de Bargeton went back, pale and trembling, to her boudoir.
“If they saw you just now, I am lost,” she told Lucien.
“So much the better!” exclaimed the poet, and she smiled to hear the cry, so full of selfish love.
A story of this kind is aggravated in the provinces by the way in which it is told. Everybody knew in a moment that Lucien had been detected at Naïs feet. M. de Chandour, elated by the important part he played in the affair, went first to tell the great news at the club, and thence from house to house, Châtelet hastening to say that he had seen nothing; but by putting himself out of court, he egged Stanislas on to talk, he drew him on to add fresh details; and Stanislas, thinking himself very witty, added a little to the tale every time that he told it. Every one flocked to Amélie’s house that evening, for by that time the most exaggerated versions of the story were in circulation among the Angoulême nobility, every narrator having followed Stanislas’ example. Women and men were alike impatient to know the truth; and the women who put their hands before their faces and shrieked the loudest were none other than Mesdames Amélie, Zéphirine, Fifine, and Lolotte, all with more or less heavy indictments of illicit love laid to their charge. There were variations in every key upon the painful theme.
“Well, well,” said one of the ladies, “poor Naïs! have you heard about it? I do not believe it myself; she has a whole blameless record behind her; she is far too proud to be anything but a patroness to M. Chardon. Still, if it is true, I pity her with all my heart.”
“She is all the more to be pitied because she is making herself frightfully ridiculous; she is old enough to be M. Lulu’s mother, as Jacques called him. The little poet it twenty-two at most; and Naïs, between ourselves, is quite forty.”
“For my own part,” said M. du Châtelet, “I think that M. de Rubempré’s position in itself proves Naïs’ innocence. A man does not go down on his knees to ask for what he has had already.”
“That is as may be!” said Francis, with levity that brought Zéphirine’s disapproving glance down on him.
“Do just tell us how it really was,” they besought Stanislas, and formed a small, secret committee in a corner of the salon.
Stanislas, in the long length, had put together a little story full of facetious suggestions, and accompanied it with pantomime, which made the thing prodigiously worse.