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Updated: June 11, 2025
Having come with the intention of offering his agent a handsome sum, he was agreeably surprised to find that Chupin's scruples would enable him to save his money. "If I hadn't found you engaged in study, Victor," he said, "I should have thought you had been drinking. What venomous insect stung you so suddenly?
I went and complained to the commissary of police, who made my father leave the house, and since then we've lived in peace." Certainly this was more than sufficient to explain and excuse Victor Chupin's indignation. And yet he had prudently withheld the most serious and important cause of his dislike.
What he refrained from telling was that years before, when he was still a mere child, without will or discernment, his father had taken him from his mother, and had started him down that terrible descent, which inevitably leads one to prison or the gallows, unless there be an almost miraculous interposition on one's behalf. This miracle had occurred in Chupin's case; but he did not boast of it.
"Nonsense, m'sieur, one does what one can; but, zounds! how hard it is to make money honestly! If my good mother could only see, she would help me famously, for there is no one like her for work! But you see one can't become a millionaire by knitting!" "Doesn't your father live with you?" Chupin's eyes gleamed angrily.
Determined to discover exactly where she stood, the duchess shortly refused, and the young man departed without a word. Evidently the mother and son were ignorant of the facts. Chupin's secret had died with him. This happened early in January.
The smiling clerk looked back through his minutes and then, in his clearest voice, he read these words, taken down as they fell from the Widow Chupin's lips: "I had been upstairs about half an hour, when I heard some one below call out 'Eh! old woman. So I went down," etc., etc. "Are you convinced?" asked M. Segmuller.
The exclamation was ironical, of course, but no one could have told from the Widow Chupin's placid countenance whether she was aware that such was the case. "Precisely, my good sir," she replied in the most composed manner. "Only this time I had scarcely taken up my needle when I heard a terrible uproar in the shop.
Thus it was that at the end of a fortnight the frightful crime committed in the Widow Chupin's drinking-den, the triple murder which had made all Paris shudder, which had furnished the material for so many newspaper articles, and the topic for such indignant comments, was completely forgotten.
She had gone over the arrangement of the Borderie so often in her own mind that the rooms seemed familiar to her, she seemed to recognize them. In spite of Chupin's description the poverty of this humble abode astonished her.
"This will teach you that the time of your compatriot, Lord Seymour, has passed by. The good-humored race of plebeians who respectfully submitted to the blows with which noblemen honored them after drinking, has died out. This ought to cure you of your unfortunate habit of placing yourself on terms of equality with all the vagabonds you meet." Chupin's hair fairly bristled with anger.
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