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In spite of her incapacity for business, Madame Evangelista's shrewdness told her: "If so clever a notary as Mathias was pacified, it must have been that he saw compensation at the cost of some one." That some one could not be Paul, as she had blindly hoped. Could it be that her daughter's fortune was to pay the costs of war?
When the slender, fair-haired Solonet, curled, perfumed, and booted like the leading gentleman at the Vaudeville, and dressed like a dandy whose most important business is a duel, entered Madame Evangelista's salon, preceding his brother notary, whose advance was delayed by a twinge of the gout, the two men presented to the life one of those famous caricatures entitled "Former Times and the Present Day," which had such eminent success under the Empire.
Though Madame Evangelista's face was calm, no Jew of the middle ages ever suffered greater torture in his caldron of boiling oil than she was enduring in her violet velvet gown. Solonet had pledged the marriage to her, but she was ignorant of the means and conditions of success. The anguish of this uncertainty was intolerable. Possibly she owed her safety to her daughter's disobedience.
Monsieur le comte will then give due acknowledgment in the marriage contract of having received the sum total of Mademoiselle Evangelista's patrimonial inheritance." Mathias could not restrain the indignation which shone in his eyes and flushed his face. "And that sum," he said, shaking, "is " "One million, one hundred and fifty-six thousand francs according to the document "
He accepted Madame Evangelista's words as an honorable "amende," instead of judging them for what they were, a declaration of war. While Solonet and his clerk superintended Natalie as she signed the documents, an operation which took time, Mathias took Paul aside and told him the meaning of the stipulation by which he had saved him from ultimate pain.
"Ah! my dear mother, Paul will never be an obstacle to our happiness, yours and mine," murmured Natalie, as she went to sleep. "Poor darling! she little knows that the man has ruined her." Madame Evangelista's soul was seized at that moment with the first idea of avarice, a vice to which many become a prey as they grow aged.
The Te Deum was sung in both camps, a dangerous situation; for there comes a moment when the vanquished side is aware of its mistake. To Madame Evangelista's mind, her son-in-law was the vanquished side. The Jew was, therefore, astonished when he learned that, on the contrary, he was sent for to estimate the value of the mother-in-law's property.
But when public opinion has taken a trend in one direction it is very difficult to turn it back. Though Paul went every day to Madame Evangelista's house, and though the notaries denied these assertions continually, the whispered calumny went on.
"Nothing is more certain, Mathias. Did I not give those diamonds to my wife? Did I not spend the hundred and fifty thousand I received from the sale of Madame Evangelista's house, in the arrangement of my house in Paris? Was I not forced to use other money for the first payments on that property demanded by the marriage contract?
He now went frequently to Madame Evangelista's, partly to occupy his vacant hours, which were harder for him to employ than for most men. There alone he breathed the atmosphere of grandeur and luxury to which he was accustomed. At forty years of age, Madame Evangelista was beautiful, with the beauty of those glorious summer sunsets which crown a cloudless day.
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