"There has been mismanagement somewhere, or else some new device of infernal malice; I say the thing has been misconducted, with the same cursed blundering that has always attended that affair; and I would rather my wife were in her coffin than have seen what I have seen to-night."
"What! in her coffin!" echoed Blassemare, with a sort of fiendish satire.
"Ay, sir, in her coffin!" said Le Prun, with a black defiance which made Blassemare shrug his shoulders and become silent.
The chill and the smell of death seemed to him to have come with these words into the room. But he would not on any account have betrayed his sensations; on the contrary, he pointed gayly to the cards, and looked a smiling interrogatory towards the fermier. But that excellent gentleman was in no mood for picquet. He declined the challenge gloomily and peremptorily.
"Ma foi! you suffer trifles to plague you strangely," said Blassemare, as they parted for the night. "What on earth does it signify after all? Thwart a woman, and she will strive to vex you—there's nothing new in that; why should not Madame Le Prun share the pretty weaknesses of her sex? On the other hand, indulge her, and she will flatter as much as she teased before. You are too sensitive, too fond, and, therefore, exaggerate trifles. Good night."
Monsieur Le Prun withdrew, and Blassemare muttered—
"Remorseless old criminal! I shall keep my eye close upon you, and if I see any sign of the sort——"
He set his teeth together, smiled resolutely and threateningly, and nodded his head twice or thrice in the direction of the door through which the fermier-general had just disappeared.
The violent explosion we have just described was not followed by any very decisive results. The fermier-general and his wife had not been upon very pleasant terms for some time previous to the scene which had so fearfully agitated the millionaire; and, whatever may have been the immediate promptings of his anger, his temper had cooled down sufficiently, before the morning, to enable him to carry the matter off, like a man of the world, with a tolerable grace. Whatever change for the worse had taken place in his feelings towards his wife, he was able to suppress the manifestation of it: but, as we have said, their relations had of late been by no means cordial, and Monsieur Le Prun did not think it necessary to affect any warmer sentiment toward his wife, nor any abatement of the sinister estrangement which had been gradually growing between them.
Meanwhile the preparations for the fête proceeded at the Chateau des Anges upon a scale worthy of the rarity of the occasion and the vastness of the proprietor's fortune.