The Lerouge Case, Émile Gaboriau [old books to read TXT] 📗

avaricious. It is a virtue you used not to possess. Do you not already regret the money you have given me?”

“Wretched woman!” murmured Noel, fast losing patience.

“Really,” continued the lady, “I pity you, oh! so much. Unfortunate lover! Shall I get up a subscription for you? In your place, I would appeal to public charity.”

Noel could stand it no longer, in spite of his resolution to remain calm. “You think it a laughing matter?” cried he. “Well! let me tell you, Juliette, I am ruined, and I have exhausted my last resources! I am reduced to expedients!”

The eyes of the young woman brightened. She looked at her lover tenderly. “Oh, if ’twas only true, my big pet!” said she. “If I only could believe you!”

The barrister was wounded to the heart. “She believes me,” thought he; “and she is glad. She detests me.”

He was mistaken. The idea that a man had loved her sufficiently to ruin himself for her, without allowing even a reproach to escape him, filled this woman with joy. She felt herself on the point of loving the man, now poor and humbled, whom she had despised when rich and proud. But the expression of her eyes suddenly changed, “What a fool I am,” cried she, “I was on the point of believing all that, and of trying to console you. Don’t pretend that you are one of those gentlemen who scatter their money broadcast. Tell that to somebody else, my friend! All men in our days calculate like moneylenders. There are only a few fools who ruin themselves now, some conceited youngsters, and occasionally an amorous old dotard. Well, you are a very calm, very grave, and very serious fellow, but above all, a very strong one.”

“Not with you, anyhow,” murmured Noel.

“Come now, stop that nonsense! You know very well what you are about. Instead of a heart, you have a great big double zero, just like a Homburg. When you took a fancy to me, you said to yourself, ‘I will expend so much on passion,’ and you have kept your word. It is an investment, like any other, in which one receives interest in the form of pleasure. You are capable of all the extravagance in the world, to the extent of your fixed price of four thousand francs a month! If it required a franc more you would very soon take back your heart and your hat, and carry them elsewhere; to one or other of my rivals in the neighborhood.”

“It is true,” answered the barrister, coolly. “I know how to count, and that accomplishment is very useful to me. It enables me to know exactly how and where I have got rid of my fortune.”

“So you really know?” sneered Juliette.

“And I can tell you, madam,” continued he. “At first you were not very exacting, but the appetite came with eating. You wished for luxury, you have it; splendid furniture, you have it; a complete establishment, extravagant dresses, I could refuse you nothing. You required a carriage, a horse, I gave them you. And I do not mention a thousand other whims. I include neither this Chinese cabinet nor the two dozen bracelets. The total is four hundred thousand francs!”

“Are you sure?”

“As one can be who has had that amount, and has it no longer.”

“Four hundred thousand francs, only fancy! Are there no centimes?”

“No.”

“Then, my dear friend, if I make up my bill, you will still owe me something.”

The entrance of the maid with the tea-tray interrupted this amorous duet, of which Noel had experienced more than one repetition. The barrister held his tongue on account of the servant. Juliette did the same on account of her lover, for she had no secrets from Charlotte, who had been with her three years, and with whom she had shared everything, sometimes even her lovers.

Madame Juliette Chaffour was a Parisienne. She was born about 1839, somewhere in the upper end of the Faubourg Montmarte. Her father was unknown. Her infancy was a long alternation of beatings and caresses, equally furious. She had lived as best she could, on sweetmeats and damaged fruit; so that now her stomach could stand anything. At twelve years old she was as thin as a nail, as green as a June apple, and more depraved than the inmates of the prison of St. Lazare. Prudhomme would have said that this precocious little hussy was totally destitute of morality. She had not the slightest idea what morality was. She thought the world was full of honest people living like her mother, and her mother’s friends. She feared neither God nor devil, but she was afraid of the police. She dreaded also certain mysterious and cruel persons, whom she had heard spoken of, who dwell near the Palais de Justice, and who experience a malicious pleasure in seeing pretty girls in trouble. As she gave no promise of beauty, she was on the point of being placed in a shop, when an old and respectable gentleman, who had known her mamma some years previously, accorded her his protection. This old gentleman, prudent and provident like all old gentlemen, was a connoisseur, and knew that to reap one must sow. He resolved first of all to give his protégé just a varnish of education. He procured masters for her, who in less than three years taught her to write, to play the piano, and to dance. What he did not procure her, however, was a lover. She therefore found one for herself, an artist who taught her nothing very new, but who carried her off to offer her half of what he possessed, that is to say nothing. At the end of three months, having had enough of it, she left the nest of her first love, with all she possessed tied up in a cotton pocket handkerchief.

During the four years which followed, she led a precarious existence, sometimes with little else to live upon but hope, which never wholly abandons a young girl