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I have not invited him to dinner: he will only spend the evening with us." And he mistook for a disposition to yield the cold tone in which she answered: "I beg you to believe that this introduction is wholly unnecessary." Thus, the famous day having come, he told his usual Saturday guests, M. and Mme. Desclavettes, M. Chapelain, and old man Desormeaux: "Eh, eh!
"All we had," he said, "would be as a grain of sand in an ocean. But we have no longer anything; we are ruined." "Ruined!" exclaimed M. Desormeaux, "ruined! And where are the forty-five thousand francs I placed into your hands?" He made no reply. "And our hundred and twenty thousand francs?" groaned M. and Mme. Desclavettes.
Gilberte remained long enough at the window to recognize her father's voice asking the concierge to open the door, and to hear the heavy gate of the adjoining house closing behind him. "Saved!" she said. It was none too soon. M. Desormeaux had just been compelled to yield; and the commissary of police was walking in.
He recommended his wife to be careful of her dress and of that of the children, and re-engaged a servant. He expressed the wish of enlarging their circle of acquaintances, and inaugurated his Saturday dinners, to which came assiduously, M. and Mme. Desclavettes, M. Chapelain the attorney, the old man Desormeaux, and a few others.
Desclavettes had been completely subjugated by the grand manners of this pretender; and M. Desclavettes did not hesitate to affirm that he had rarely met any one who pleased him more. The others, M. Chapelain and old Desormeaux, did not, doubtless, share this optimism; but M. Costeclar's annual half-million obscured singularly their clear-sightedness.
We are but children by the side of them." It was through M. Chapelain, the Desclavettes, and old Desormeaux, that these news reached the Rue St. Gilles. It was also through Maxence, whose battalion had been dissolved, and who, whilst waiting for something better, had accepted a clerkship in the office of the Orleans Railway, where he earned two hundred francs a month.
The knocks had now become violent blows; and it was evident that the door would soon be broken in, if M. Desormeaux did not make up his mind to open it. The light was put out. With the assistance of his daughter, M. Favoral lifted himself upon the window-sill, whilst Maxence held the sheets with both hands. "I beseech you, Vincent," repeated Mme. Favoral, "write to us.
M. Desormeaux was wont to say, "Oh! he knows what he is about." And Mme. Favoral tried to persuade herself, that, in this respect at least, her husband was a remarkable man. She attributed his silence and his distractions to the grave cares that filled his mind.
Whatever M. Favoral might have done, they only saw in him now the friend, the host whose bread they had broken together more than a hundred times, the man whose probity, up to this fatal night, had remained far above suspicion. Pale, excited, they crowded around him. "Have you lost your mind?" spoke M. Desormeaux.
Two of them, M. Chapelain and old Desormeaux, were perfectly able to appreciate him at his just value; but, in affirming that he made half a million a year, M. Favoral had, as it were, thrown over his shoulders that famous ducal cloak which concealed all deformities. Without waiting for his wife's answer, M. Favoral brought his protege in front of Mlle. Gilberte.
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