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And now, with this villa still on our hands, and the season already announcing itself, ruin stares us in the face, mesdames ruin!" It was a moving picture. Yet we remained strangely unaffected by this tale of woe. Madame Fouchet herself, the woman, not the actress, was to blame, I think, for our unfeelingness.
He knew all the points of the situation, the chief of which was, as Fouchet had hinted, that the girl had refused to wed the bon parti, who was a connection of the step-mother. As for the step-mother's murderous outcry, "Kill her! kill her!" the cobbler refused to take a dramatic view of this outburst.
The mere's insult was drowned in a storm of voices? for there came a loud protest from the group of neighbors. Madame Fouchet, meanwhile, was sustaining her own role with great dignity. Her attitude of self-control could only have been learned in a school where insult was an habitual weapon. She smiled, an infuriating, exasperating, successful smile.
"I was horn in Marseilles, and my right name is Jean Fouchet. My father intended me for the priesthood, and gave me a good college education in Paris. His hopes, however, were destined to disappointment. In college I formed the habit of gambling, and a year after my graduation found me at Monte Carlo. While there I quarrelled with a gambling accomplice and ended by killing him.
It was in this garden that our acquaintance with our landlord deepened into something like friendship. Monsieur Fouchet was always to be found there, tying up the rose-trees, or mending the paths, or shearing the bit of turf. "Mon jardin, c'est un peu moi, vous savez it is my pride and my consolation." At the latter word, Fouchet was certain to sigh.
Whatever secret of the past may have hovered over the Fouchet household, the evil bird had not made its nest in madame's breast, that was clear; her smooth, white brow was the sign of a rose-leaf conscience; that dark curtain of hair, looped madonna-wise over each ear, framed a face as unruffled as her conscience.
Even Fouchet was no longer a familiar figure in the foreground of his garden; his roses were blooming now for the present owners of his villa. He and madame had betaken themselves to a box of a hut on the very outskirts of the village a miserable little hovel with two rooms and a bit of pasture land being the substitute, as a dwelling, for the gay villa and its garden along the sea-cliffs.
The stairway had the line of beauty, describing a pretty curve before its glassy steps led us to a narrow entry; it had also the brevity which is said to be the very soul, l'anima viva, of all true wit; but it was quite long and straight enough to serve Madame Fouchet as a stage for a prolonged monologue, enlivened with much affluence of gesture.
Monsieur Fouchet, meanwhile, was making a brave second to his wife's bustling welcome; he was rubbing his hands vigorously, a somewhat suspicious action in a Frenchman, I have had occasion to notice, after the completion of a bargain.
A reconciliation was immediately effected, and the street as immediately lost all interest in the play, the audience melting away as speedily as did the wrath of the disputants. "Le bon Dieu soit loue," cried Madame Fouchet, puffing, as she mounted the stairs a few moments later "God be praised" she hadn't come here to the provinces to learn her rights to be taught her alphabet.
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