"Well, François Xavier Lecour, the peasant, my son, the noble, must have these livres."
Her black eyes flashed. "Will you have the poor boy disgraced in the act of doing you credit? Look at me, unnatural father, and reflect that your child is to experience from you his earliest wrong."
Lecour quailed. His powers of spoken argument were not great. He said nothing, but rose, threw off his coat suddenly, and sat down again.
"Yes," she exclaimed, angry tears rolling down her cheeks. "Your wife will sell her wardrobe and her dowry—little enough it was—for my son shall not want while he has a mother, and that mother owns a stitch."
It was when it came to meeting clap-trap sentiment that trader's inferior grain showed, and he faltered.
"I will go as far as a thousand. It is all it is worth."
By that word he exposed the small side of an otherwise worthy nature. She sprang to the attack.
"Diable! am I linked to a skinflint?"
"A skinflint, forsooth, at a thousand livres!"
"Yes," she cried in a fresh flood of tears. "A wretch, a miser. You are unworthy, sir, to be linked to a family from whom Germain takes his gentlemanly qualities. Had he nothing but you in him, he would be a grovelling clod-hopper to-day instead of a favourite of kings."