“I don’t care a hang!” said Trublot, “so long as one amuses oneself at her place. Anyhow, she doesn’t make you sing, and she isn’t forever strumming away on a piano like the other. Oh! that piano! Listen, when one is deafened at home, when one has had the misfortune to marry a mechanical piano which frightens everybody away, one would be precious stupid not to arrange a pleasant little nest elsewhere, where one could receive one’s friends in their slippers.”
“Last Sunday,” related Gueulin, “Clarisse wanted me to lunch alone with her. I declined. After those sort of lunches, one always does something foolish; and I was afraid of seeing her take up her quarters with me the day she left Duveyrier for good. You know, she detests him. Oh! her disgust almost makes her ill. Well, the girl doesn’t care much for pimples either. But she hasn’t the resource of sending him elsewhere like his wife has; otherwise, if she could pass him over to her maid, I assure you she’d get rid of the job precious quick.”
The cab stopped. They alighted before a dark and silent house in the Rue de la Cerisaie. But they had to wait for the other cab fully ten minutes, Bachelard having taken his driver with him to drink a grog after the quarrel in the Rue Montmartre. On the staircase, as severe-looking as those of the middle classes, Monsieur Josserand again asked some questions respecting Duveyrier’s lady friend, but the uncle merely answered:
“A woman of the world, a very decent girl. She won’t eat you.”
It was a little maid, with a rosy complexion, who opened the door to them. She took the gentlemen’s coats with familiar and and tender smiles. For a moment, Trublot kept her in a corner of the ante-room, whispering things in her ear which almost made her choke, as though being tickled. But Bachelard had pushed open the drawing-room door, and he at once introduced Monsieur Josserand. The latter stood for a moment embarrassed, finding Clarisse ugly, and not understanding how the counselor could prefer this sort of creature—black and skinny, and with a head of hair like a poodle—to his wife, one of the most beautiful women of society. Clarisse, however, was charming. She had preserved the Parisian cackle, a superficial and borrowed wit, an itch of drollery caught by rubbing up against men, but was able to put on a grand lady sort of air when she chose.