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Updated: May 21, 2025
These alternations of tenderness and severity worked upon this feeble creature whose only life was through his amorous fibre, the same morbid effect which great changes from tropical heat to arctic cold produce upon the human body. It was a moral pleurisy, which wore him out like a physical disease. Flore alone could thus affect him; for to her, and to her alone, he was as good as he was foolish.
In the lowest human creature we find an animal instinct whose persistency resembles thought. The next day, Flore, who had been reflecting on her master's silence, waited in expectation of some momentous communication; but although he kept near her, and looked at her on the sly with passionate glances, Jean-Jacques still found nothing to say.
By the marriage contract Rouget secured to Flore a dower of one hundred thousand francs, and a life annuity of thirty thousand more. After the wedding, which was sumptuous, Agathe returned to Paris the happiest of mothers, and told Joseph and Desroches what she called the good news.
As he had always been thought extremely deficient in mind, people did not notice the constant lowering of his faculties. His love for Flore was the one thing that kept him alive; in fact, he existed only for her, and his weakness in her presence was unbounded; he obeyed the creature's mere look, and watched her movements as a dog watches every gesture of his master.
As to the power of attorney demanded by the ferocious colonel, who in the eyes of all Issoudun was a hero, he had it as soon as he wanted it; for Flore fell under the man's dominion as France had fallen under that of Napoleon. Like a butterfly whose feet are caught in the incandescent wax of a taper, Rouget rapidly dissipated his remaining strength.
The old bachelor, guided, not by any justice to his family, nor by personal avarice, but solely by his passion, steadily refused to make the transfer, on the ground that Flore was to be his sole heir. The unhappy creature knew to what extent Flore loved Max, and he believed he would be abandoned the moment she was made rich enough to marry.
"Hey! are not we all under a Republic that is one and indivisible?" cried the uncle from his station. "We are under a Directory," said the doctor, "and I know of no law which allows a man to come from Vatan and fish in the territory of Issoudun"; then he said to Flore, "Have you got a mother, little one!" "No, monsieur; and my father is in the asylum at Bourges.
"And did you intend," said Flore to the old man, "to give a hundred and fifty thousand francs to your nephew?" "Never, never!" cried Jean-Jacques, on whom Flore had fixed her eye. "There is one way to settle all this," said the painter, "and that is to return them to you, uncle." "No, no, keep them," said the old man.
"Yes, let us take the carriage," cried the old man, in his anxiety to make his two tyrants agree. "Uncle, you will come with me, alone, and on foot, or I shall never return here; I shall know that the town of Issoudun tells the truth, when it declares you are under the dominion of Mademoiselle Flore Brazier.
"What you have come to do can't be done in two weeks, nor in two years; you ought never to leave your brother, but live here and try to give him some ideas of religion. You cannot countermine the fortifications of Flore and Maxence without getting a priest to sap them. That is my advice, and it is high time to set about it."
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