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Alone in this little town of Grenoble, for which he had left his native village of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, he had, just before meeting Adrienne, fallen a victim to a profound melancholy and realized the necessity of deciding upon his career. He was then thirty-four.
The money squandered at Rue Prony, Vaudrey had acquired; it was the savings of the honest people of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, the parents, the old folks, that he threw as in smelting into the crucible of the girl's mansion. Adrienne expressed no desire that was not fulfilled, and Sulpice who was, moreover, confident and lulled by her quietude, felt no remorse.
He had written to his notary at Grenoble, and this old friend had replied that the farms of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, mortgaged and cut up one after another, now represented only a ridiculous value, but that after all, Vaudrey had nothing to be concerned about, seeing that Madame Vaudrey's fortune was intact. Adrienne's fortune!
Even during the days of his struggle in crowded Paris, in the heat of political strife, his thoughts would fly back to the old home at Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, recalling to mind the old armchair where his father used to sit, the father whose kiss he had never known, hearing again his mother's voice from the great oak staircase with its heavy balusters, and he recalled at the same moment, the landscape with its living figures, the spotted, steel-colored guinea-fowl screaming from the branches of the elms, the vineyard hands returning from work, to trample with bare feet the great clusters of grapes piled up in the wine-vat in the cellar whose odor intoxicated!
It was there that he went every year to pass his holidays with his mother, who had had the courage to send him away, just as during winter she had plunged him into cold water to the Lyceum at Grenoble, whence he would return to Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, "so thin, poor child!" as his mother said. And how fat she would send him back again to school, to make the masters ashamed of their stinginess.
Well! if you cannot pay it, my dear, I will advise I will seek " There was nothing to seek. Vaudrey would evidently get himself out of the affair but the document matured at an unfortunate time. He did not dare to mortgage La Saulière, his farm at Saint-Laurent-du-Pont. He had reflected that Adrienne might learn all about it. And then Marianne broke in upon his confidences.
If need be, without Adrienne's even knowing it, he could mortgage his farms at Saint-Laurent-du-Pont! "Monsieur de Rosas would not have hesitated. But in his case there would have been no merit," said Mademoiselle Kayser. At the name of that man, coupled with the recollection of him, Sulpice felt himself spurred to a decision.
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