Orders began to flow in. This news reassured Madame Proquet, and made her mother's heart swell with pride.
'Did I not tell you so?' repeated Fanchette.
But something that dropped like a bomb into the quiet household in the little Breton town was the news that a rich financier of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré had just paid 10,000 francs for his portrait, which Henri had taken hardly a month to paint.
'But the dear fellow will be making a fortune and losing his head,' exclaimed Madame Proquet.
Fanchette herself was dumfounded. It seemed to them that their boy was going to slip from them—that fame and fortune must needs raise an inseparable barrier between the luxurious studio which Henri talked of, and was embellishing day by day, and the humble maternal home which never changed at all. They were both believers in the quiet and unobtruding happiness that hides itself and goes unenvied, and they could neither of them understand how happiness was possible in that feverish Paris, where artists and men of letters are drawn body and soul into the whirl of a great vortex; and the good souls bewailed themselves, foreseeing terrible things and getting into their heads a thousand ideas, which all had but one conclusion—'Our Henri is lost to us!'
How mistaken they were!
The years followed one another, and Henri came regularly twice a year to the dear little house where the ivy and jasmine, the clematis and the honeysuckle protected our successful man against intruders: the jealous, the gossips, the bores and all the jostling crowd that hovers around celebrities, and often makes them its prey.
Better than that, he soon did something that should still strengthen his position in the good books of Madame Proquet and Fanchette. He married a girl as good as she was beautiful, an artist's ideal, whom he had the greatest difficulty to get Fanchette to tutoyer.
'But, my dear, I cannot say "thee" and "thou" to that beautiful lady,' pleaded poor Fanchette.
'Nonsense, Fanchette! and why not? She is your daughter as much as I am your boy.'