This change of costume was expensive, and when he arrived in Paris Dodichet had but one hundred francs left of the thousand Seringat had lent him. But, on the very day of his return, he received a letter from Troyes in an envelope with a black border.
"My poor aunt is dead!" he said to himself; "faith! I'll not play the hypocrite so far as to weep for her. Her money arrives in the nick of time. I will pay Seringat, I will buy a cashmere shawl for Boulotte, and I will weave days of gold, truffles, and champagne; for the dear aunt was rich. She must have left me more than a hundred thousand francs!"
Dodichet broke the seal; the letter did, in fact, announce the death of his aunt, who had left her whole fortune to a third or fourth cousin, as she did not choose that it should go to her scapegrace of a nephew, who had made such a wretched use of the money his other relations had left him.
Dodichet did not expect to be disinherited; he angrily crumpled the notary's letter which told him the news; and for the first time his reflections were not rose-colored.
XV
A RASCALLY BROTHER-IN-LAW
After his quarrel with Nathalie, Adhémar sought distraction and pleasure to no purpose; go where he would, he found neither. When one loves truly, it is a very painful thing to cease to see her whose presence had a never-failing charm; one tries in vain to put a brave face upon it, and to tell one's self that a lost love is readily replaced by another; in reality, we cannot tear a beloved image from our hearts so easily; we are conscious of an aching void, a brooding melancholy which follows us everywhere; and we prefer the memories of the past for which we sigh to all the pleasures that the present has to offer us.
Adhémar was unhappy, and dissatisfied with himself; and yet he strove to convince himself that he was justified in breaking off that intimacy which had so much charm for him.
"I loved her," he would say to himself; "I loved her sincerely, but she did not love me, for she deceived me. That pipe case did not belong to any woman. So that she received visits from men without telling me! and when one's mistress once has mysteries of that sort in her life, everyone knows what it means. And that smell of tobacco, which I had noticed before! That smoker must have come often to see her! Ah! Nathalie, Nathalie! you who were the woman I had dreamed of—to be loved by whom would have made me so happy! But, no, women cannot be faithful; why should she have acted differently from the others?"
On a certain day, when the young author was walking along the street in gloomy mood, thinking such thoughts as these, he suddenly found himself face to face with Lucien, who, also, was sighing dolorously.
"Ah! Lucien!"