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Updated: May 8, 2025
It was there, in the neighbourhood of the Catholic Club of which he had just been made honorary president that M. Le Merquier lived. He was avocat, deputy for Lyons, business man of all the great communities of France; and Hemerlingue, moved by a deep-seated instinct, had intrusted him with the affairs of his firm.
But it was enough for her to watch her son and Le Merquier to understand what harm one was doing to the other, what perfidious and poisoned meaning fell from this long discourse on the unfortunate man whom one might have believed asleep, except for the trembling of his strong shoulders and the clinching of his hands in his hair, while hiding his face.
The big man puffed violently into the flowers of his wife's little white hat. Jansoulet's mother looked at her son. "I have spoken of the honour of the Chamber, gentlemen. On that point I have more to say." Now Le Merquier was reading no longer. After the chairman of the committees, the orator came on the scene, or rather the judge.
Jansoulet took his arm to assist him in the descent. "Oh! yes, he was strong. But you are stronger than anybody else," he said in his fervid Gascon accent. Hemerlingue did not protest. "I owe it all to my wife. So I urge you to make your peace with her, because if you don't " "Oh! never fear we will come Saturday; but you will go with me to Le Merquier."
Only more ceremony was used here. "Take Le Merquier for instance. Instead of giving him your money outright in a big purse as you would do with a seraskier, you beat around the bush. The fellow likes pictures. He is always trading with Schwalbach, who uses him as a bait to catch Catholic customers. Very good! you offer him a picture, a souvenir to hang on a panel in his cabinet.
"My dear Monsieur Le Merquier," he said, in an engaging, affable tone, "I have a Virgin by Tintoret just the size of your panel." It was impossible to read anything in the advocate's eyes, which had now taken refuge behind their gleaming shelter. "Permit me to hang it there, opposite your desk. It will give you an excuse for thinking of me sometimes "
The two words "Hemerlingue," "pictures" meeting in the same phrase so unexpectedly, restored all his doubts, all his perplexities. He did not give himself away yet, however, and let Le Merquier advance, word by word, testing the ground for his stumbling advances. People had told him often of the collection of his honourable colleague.
And you can imagine whether worldly curiosity was rampant around that ex-odalisque turned fervent Catholic, as she entered the room, escorted by a sacristan-like figure with a livid face and spectacles, Maître Le Merquier, Deputy for Lyon, Hemerlingue's man of business, who attended the baroness when the baron was "slightly indisposed," as upon this occasion.
He paused, compelled by his suppressed emotion; then: "My father is dead, Maitre Le Merquier, but my mother still lives, and it is for her sake, for her peace, that I have held back, that I hold back still, before the scandal of my justification.
Ushered into the advocate's waiting-room, a large parlor with curtains of starched muslin as fine as that of which surplices are made, its only ornament a large and beautiful copy of Tintoret's Dead Christ over the door, his uncertainty and anxiety changed to indignant conviction. It was not possible. He had been misled touching Le Merquier.
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