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"I never was in an office where there was so much jesting as there is here over the clients." Derville had made the Colonel retire to the bedroom when the Countess was admitted. "Madame," he said, "not knowing whether it would be agreeable to you to meet M. le Comte Chabert, I have placed you apart. If, however, you should wish it " "It is an attention for which I am obliged to you."
"You will understand, Monsieur, that I came out of the womb of the grave as naked as I came from my mother's; so that six months afterwards, when I remembered, one fine morning, that I had been Colonel Chabert, and when, on recovering my wits, I tried to exact from my nurse rather more respect than she paid to any poor devil, all my companions in the ward began to laugh.
"But, monsieur," said the Comtesse, provoked by the way in which Derville turned and laid her on the gridiron, "even if I grant that your M. Chabert is living, the law will uphold my second marriage on account of the children, and I shall get off with the restitution of two hundred and twenty-five thousand francs to M. Chabert."
A second period of eighteen months in the office of a notary, Maitre Passez, completed his law apprenticeship. In the first pages of Colonel Chabert the novelist gives us a sketch of the interior where he acquired his knowledge of chicane.
"I never had a letter from Comte Chabert; and if some one is pretending to be the Colonel, it is some swindler, some returned convict, like Coignard perhaps. It makes me shudder only to think of it. Can the Colonel rise from the dead, monsieur?
M. Chabert, on his part, agrees to accept judgment on a friendly suit, by which his certificate of death shall be annulled, and his marriage dissolved." "That will not suit me in the least," said the Countess with surprise. "I will be a party to no suit; you know why."
So one morning he added up the sums he had advanced to the said Chabert with the costs, and begged the Comtesse Ferraud to claim from M. le Comte Chabert the amount of the bill, assuming that she would know where to find her first husband.
Others had recourse to inoculation, in order to give it a more benign character; and others, and among them Chabert, considered that it possessed a character of peculiar malignity, and he gave it a name expressive of its nature and situation 'nasal catarrh'. It exhibited the ordinary symptoms of coryza: it was a catarrhal affection in its early stage; but it afterwards degenerated into a species of palsy.
"I have given you near on a million, and you are cheapening my misfortunes. Very well; now I will have you you and your fortune. Our goods are in common, our marriage is not dissolved " "But monsieur is not Colonel Chabert!" cried the Countess, in feigned amazement. "Indeed!" said the old man, in a tone of intense irony. "Do you want proofs? I found you in the Palais Royal "
She resolved, nevertheless, to bind the Count to her by the strongest of all ties, by a chain of gold, and vowed to be so rich that her fortune might make her second marriage dissoluble, if by chance Colonel Chabert should ever reappear. And he had reappeared; and she could not explain to herself why the struggle she had dreaded had not already begun.
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