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He said: "At the end of a month I'll have had enough of it, and I'll be forced to wait patiently for six months through politeness." Then, a rupture exasperated him, with the scenes, the allusions, the clinging attachment, of the abandoned woman. He avoided meeting Madame Poincot.
We now have under our eyes a note written by him on the margin of a quarto entitled Correspondence of Lord Germain with Generals Clinton, Cornwallis, and the Admirals on the American station. Versailles, Poincot, book-seller; and Paris, Pissot, bookseller, Quai des Augustins. Here is the note: "Oh, you who are!
Madame Poincot was standing up exasperated, just on the point of going away, while her husband had seized hold of her dress, exclaiming: "But remember that you are destroying our daughters, your daughters, our children!" She answered stubbornly: "I will not go back to you!" Renoldi understood everything, came over to them in a state of great agitation, and gasped: "What, does she refuse to go?"
Henceforth, he had no hope, no ambition, no satisfaction in life, and he looked forward to no pleasure in existence. But one morning a card was placed in his hand, with the name "Joseph Poincot, Shipowner, Havre." The husband! The husband, who had said nothing, realizing that there was no use in struggling against the desperate obstinacy of women. What did he want?
He stammered: "Why, yes certainly, Monsieur I myself be assured of it no doubt it is right, it is only quite right." This time M. Poincot no longer declined to sit down. Renoldi then rushed up the stairs, and pausing at the door of his mistress's room, to collect his senses, entered gravely. "There is somebody below waiting to see you," he said. "'Tis to tell you something about your daughters."
Then Renoldi, with the determination of a desperate man playing his last card, began talking to her in his turn, and pleaded the cause of the poor girls, the cause of the husband, his own cause. And when he stopped, trying to find some fresh argument, M. Poincot, at his wits' end, murmured, in the affectionate style in which he used to speak to her in days gone by: "Look here, Delphine!
Suddenly, one of them, the taller, Paul d'Henricol, pressed the arm of his comrade, Jean Renoldi, then, in a whisper, said: "Hallo, here's Madame Poincot; give a good look at her. I assure you that she's making eyes at you." She was moving along on the arm of her husband.
M. Poincot picked up his hat, which had fallen down near where he sat, dusted off his knees the signs of kneeling on the floor, then raising both hands sorrowfully, while Renoldi was seeing him to the door, remarked with a parting bow: "We are very unfortunate, Monsieur." Then he walked away from the house with a heavy step.
She was regarded as the very type of a virtuous, uncorrupted woman. So upright that no man had ever dared to think of her. And yet for the last month Paul d'Henricol had been assuring his friend Renoldi that Madame Poincot was in love with him, and he maintained that there was no doubt of it. "Be sure I don't deceive myself. I see it clearly.
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