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Updated: May 13, 2025
In his eyes could be read the proposition that was burning upon his lips, "Shall I not go for Gilberte?" But that proposition he had no time to express. Though they had been speaking very low, Mlle. Lucienne had heard. "I have a friend," she said, "who would certainly be willing to sit up with me." They all went up to her. "What friend," inquired the commissary of police.
Then turning suddenly to her: "By the way, my dear, has Edmond told you of his great discovery?" "No; what discovery?" asked Gilberte, turning her pretty caressing eyes full on the young sergeant. The cherub blushed whenever a woman looked at him in that way, as if the exquisiteness of his sensations was too much for him.
Gilberte also displayed much enthusiasm for her new occupation as nurse; she barely took the time to throw a lace scarf over her head, and the three women went downstairs. When they reached the bottom and stood in the spacious vestibule, looking out through the main entrance, of which the leaves had been thrown wide back, they beheld a crowd collected in the street before the house.
Even after I had returned home I did not taste them, since, every day, the necessity which made me hope that on the morrow I should arrive at the clear, calm, happy contemplation of Gilberte, that she would at last confess her love for me, explaining to me the reasons by which she had been obliged, hitherto, to conceal it, that same necessity forced me to regard the past as of no account, to look ahead of me only, to consider the little advantages that she had given me not in themselves and as if they were self-sufficient, but like fresh rungs of the ladder on which I might set my feet, which were going to allow me to advance a step further and finally to attain the happiness which I had not yet encountered.
"Instead of gathering so much useless information," he added, "why did you not post yourself as to the outlets of the house?" He was "sold"; and yet he manifested neither spite nor anger. He seemed in no wise anxious to run after the fugitive. Upon the features of Maxence and of Mlle. Gilberte, and more still in Mme. Favoral's eyes, he had read that it would be useless for the present.
The first hour he was there did not promise well for the pleasantness of their future relations; he carried matters with a high hand, insisting that he should be given the best bedroom, trailing the scabbard of his sword noisily up the marble staircase; but encountering Gilberte in the corridor he drew in his horns, bowed politely, and passed stiffly on.
Of course, on every page of my exercise-books, I wrote out, in endless repetition, her name and address, but at the sight of those vague lines which I might trace, without her having to think, on that account, of me, I felt discouraged, because they spoke to me, not of Gilberte, who would never so much as see them, but of my own desire, which they seemed to shew me in its true colours, as something purely personal, unreal, tedious and ineffective.
He had been his mother's darling; she had impoverished herself, expending all the profits of their little business to send him to college. And he adored Paris and bewailed his compulsory absence from it when talking to Gilberte, did this wounded cherub, whom the young woman had displayed great good-fellowship in nursing.
"Why, then, not answer, Yes!" thought she, with the harrowing emotions of the gambler who is about to stake his all upon one card. And what a game for Mlle. Gilberte, and what a stake! Suppose she had been mistaken. Suppose that Marius should be one of those villains who make of seduction a science. Would she still be her own mistress, after answering?
What do you think of that? Come, will you go? We'll drink champagne, and we'll laugh. No? Zut then, and my compliments to your family." But, at the moment of leaving the room, her heart failed her. "This is doubtless the last time I shall ever see you, M. de Tregars," she said. "Farewell! You know now why I, who have a dowry of a million, I envy Gilberte Favoral. Once more farewell.
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