The more Fifi thought of this scheme of getting rid of Louis Bourcet and entrapping Cartouche the more rapturous she grew. She had two ways of expressing joy and thankfulness—praying and dancing. She plumped down on her knees, and for about twenty seconds thanked God earnestly for having shown her the way to get rid of Louis Bourcet—for Fifi’s prayers, like herself, were very primitive and childlike. Then, jumping up, she danced for twenty minutes, kicking as high as she could, until she finally kicked the picture of Louis Bourcet off the mantelpiece to the floor, on which it fell with a sharp crash.
Madame Bourcet, in the next room, stirred at once. Fifi again plumped down on her knees, and when Madame Bourcet opened the door Fifi was deeply engaged in saying her prayers. Madame Bourcet shut the door softly—the noise could not have been in Fifi’s room.
As soon as Madame Bourcet was again snoozing, Fifi, moving softly about, lighted her candle and wrote a letter to Cartouche.
“Cartouche, my mind is made up. This evening I promised Louis Bourcet, in Madame Bourcet’s presence, to marry him. When I had done it I felt as if a load were lifted off my mind, for as soon as the words were out of my mouth I determined that nothing on earth should induce me to keep my promise. I feel that I am right, Cartouche, and I have not felt so pious for a long time. I don’t know how it will be managed. I am only certain of one thing, and that is that Louis Bourcet will never become Monsieur Fifi Chiaramonti—for that is just what it would amount to, he is so good and so colorless. I am not in the least sorry for Louis. I am only sorry for myself that I have been bothered with him so long, and besides, I wish to marry some one else. Fifi.”
Fifi crept into bed after writing this letter. For the first time she found the hard lump in the middle of her mattress uncomfortable.
“Never mind,” thought Fifi to herself, “I shall soon be rid of it, and sleep in peace, as I haven’t done since I had it.”
Fifi’s dreams were happy that night, and when she waked in the morning she felt a kind of dewy freshness in her heart, like the awakening of spring. It was springtime already, and as Fifi lay cosily in her little white bed she contrived joyous schemes for her own benefit, which some people might have called plotting mischief. She reasoned with herself thus:
“Fifi, you have been miserable ever since you got the odious, hateful hundred thousand francs, and it was nasty of Cartouche to give you the lottery ticket. Fifi, you are not very old, but you are of the sort which does not change, and you will be Fifi as long as you live. You can not be happy away from Cartouche and the theater and Toto—unfeeling wretch that you are, to let Toto be torn from you! So the only thing to do is to return to love and work. If you spend all your money Louis Bourcet would not marry you to save your life, and then you can go back to the theater and make Cartouche marry you. Oh, how simple it is! Stupid, stupid Fifi, that you did not think of this before!” And, throbbing with happiness at the emancipation before her, Fifi rose and dressed herself. She was distracted by the riotous singing of the robins in the one solitary tree in the courtyard. Heretofore the little birds had been mute and half frozen, but this morning, in the warm spring sun, they sang in ecstasy.
Fifi not only felt different, but she actually looked so; and the blitheness which shone in her eyes when she went to ask Madame Bourcet if she might have Angéline, the sour maid-of-all-work, to go with her to the shops that morning might have awakened suspicion in most minds. But not in Madame Bourcet’s. Fifi slyly let drop something about her trousseau, and Madame Bourcet hastened to say that she might take Angéline.
In a little while the two were ready to start. In her hand Fifi carried a little purse, containing twenty-one francs, and in her reticule she carried her handkerchief, her smelling-salts and ten crisp thousand-franc notes.