“In the first place, my dear gentlemen, I have never, since I’ve been in the business, found man or woman to haggle over happiness. Besides,” she said, letting a cold smile flicker on her lips, and enforcing it by an icy glance full of catlike distrust, “if it doesn’t concern your happiness, it concerns your fortune; and at the height where I find you lodging no man haggles over a ‘dot’—Come,” she said, “out with it! What is it you want to know, my lambs?”
“About the Beunier family,” replied Bixiou, very glad to find out something in this indirect manner about persons in whom he was interested.
“Oh! as for that,” she said, “one louis is quite enough.”
“Why?”
“Because I hold all the mother’s jewels and she’s on tenter-hooks every three months, I can tell you! It is hard work for her to pay the interest on what I’ve lent her. Do you want to marry there, simpleton?” she added, addressing Gazonal; “then pay me forty francs and I’ll talk four hundred worth.”
Gazonal produced a forty-franc gold-piece, and Madame Nourrisson gave him startling details as to the secret penury of certain so-called fashionable women. This dealer in cast-off clothes, getting lively as she talked, pictured herself unconsciously while telling of others. Without betraying a single name or any secret, she made the three men shudder by proving to them how little so-called happiness existed in Paris that did not rest on the vacillating foundation of borrowed money. She possessed, laid away in her drawers, the secrets of departed grandmothers, living children, deceased husbands, dead granddaughters,—memories set in gold and diamonds. She learned appalling stories by making her clients talk of one another; tearing their secrets from them in moments of passion, of quarrels, of anger, and during those cooler negotiations which need a loan to settle difficulties.
“Why were you ever induced to take up such a business?” asked Gazonal.
“For my son’s sake,” she said naively.
Such women almost invariably justify their trade by alleging noble motives. Madame Nourrisson posed as having lost several opportunities for marriage, also three daughters who had gone to the bad, and all her illusions. She showed the pawn-tickets of the Mont-de-Piete to prove the risks her business ran; declared that she did not know how to meet the “end of the month”; she was robbed, she said,—robbed.
The two artists looked at each other on hearing that expression, which seemed exaggerated.