But even Bigourdin, who had not been to Paris for ten years, had not appreciated till now the depths of poverty into which Fortinbras and his sister had sunk. His last visit to them had been painful. A drunken, dishevelled hostess, especially when she is your own sister, does not make for charm. But they lived in a reputable apartment at Auteuil, and there was a good carpet on the floor of the salon and chairs and tables such as are found in Christian dwellings, and on the mantelpiece stood the ormolu clock, and on the walls hung the pictures which had once adorned their home in London. How had they come down to this? He shivered, cold and ill at ease.
“As you must be hungry after your long journey, Gaspard,” said Madame Robineau, “I should advise you to go out to a restaurant. The cuisine of the femme de journée I do not recommend. For me, I must keep watch, and it being Friday I fast as usual.”
Fortinbras made no pretence at hospitality. Had he been able to set forth a banquet, he felt that every morsel would have been turned into stone by the basilisk eyes of Clothilde. Both men rose simultaneously, glad to be free. They went out, took an omnibus haphazard and eventually entered a restaurant in the neighbourhood of the Tour Saint-Jacques.
“Mon vieux Daniel,” said Bigourdin, as soon as they were seated. “Tell me frankly, for I don’t understand. How comes it that you are in these dreadful straits?”
Fortinbras smiled sadly.
“One earns little by translating from French into English and still less by dispensing happiness to youth.”
“But——” Bigourdin hesitated. “But you have had other resources—not much certainly, but still something.”
“What do you mean?” asked Fortinbras. “You know that in five years Cécile scattered her own dowry to the winds and left me at the edge of a whirlpool of debt. All of my own I could scrape together and borrow I threw in to save myself from prison. She had no heritage from her father. On what else can we have lived save on my precarious earnings?”
Bigourdin, both elbows on the table, plucked at his upstanding bristles and gazed intently at Fortinbras.
“Ever since the great misfortune, when you returned to France, Cécile has had her own income.”