“Perhaps, Mademoiselle, you could not love him.”
“Your Majesty, I hated him,” answered Fifi, with the greatest earnestness. “He was the most correct person and the greatest bore in the universe. Unlike Cartouche, he thought himself much too good for me, but was willing to take me on account of my hundred thousand francs. At first I tried to frighten him off.”
“How, Mademoiselle?” asked the Emperor, now laughing outright.
“Sire, by—by—buying things. Dreadful clothes, and—and—monkeys, but I was afraid of the monkeys and would not keep them—and a blue satin bed made for the Empress—”
“I know that diabolical bed—so they swindled you into buying it?”
“No, Sire, it was only a way of squandering money and frightening that ridiculous Louis Bourcet. And—I made love to him very outrageously—which was nearly the death of him. Louis Bourcet is not the sort of a man to be first across the bridge of Lodi. The only way to have got him across would have been to carry him. But in spite of all I could do he would have married me if I had not found a way to get rid of my money.”
“Tell me how you contrived to get your money in your own hands?”
Then Fifi told about putting the box of old shoes in the bank and sewing the money up in the mattress, just as she had told the Pope, and both the Emperor and the Empress laughed aloud at it. And Fifi further explained how Cartouche’s letter had showed her the way to make a good use of her uncomfortable fortune instead of merely throwing it away.
The Empress then asked, in her charming manner, some questions about Fifi’s life, and both the Emperor and Empress seemed excessively amused at the simplicity of Fifi’s answer.
“I shall have to tell Lebrun, the arch-treasurer, about this,” cried the Emperor; “and now, what can I or the Empress do for you?”