“Yes, madame,” said the man. “Well, he has settled thirty thousand francs a year on Mademoiselle Bijou by the marriage articles. And her elder sister, they say, is going to be married to a rich butcher.” “Your business looks rather hopeless, I am afraid,” said Josepha to the Baroness. “Monsieur le Baron is no longer where I lodged him.” Ten minutes later Madame Bijou was announced. Josepha very prudently placed the Baroness in the boudoir, and drew the curtain over the door. “You would scare her,” said she to Madame Hulot. “She would let nothing out if she suspected that you were interested in the information. Leave me to catechise her. Hide there, and you will hear everything. It is a scene that is played quite as often in real life as on the stage--” “Well, Mother Bijou,” she said to an old woman dressed in tartan stuff, and who looked like a porter’s wife in her Sunday best, “so you are all very happy? Your daughter is in luck.” “Oh, happy? As for that!--My daughter gives us a hundred francs a month, while she rides in a carriage and eats off silver plate--she is a millionary, is my daughter! Olympe might have lifted me above labor. To have to work at my age? Is that being good to me?” “She ought not to be ungrateful, for she owes her beauty to you,” replied Josepha; “but why did she not come to see me? It was I who placed her in ease by settling her with my uncle.” “Yes, madame, with old Monsieur Thoul, but he is very old and broken--” “But what have you done with him? Is he with you? She was very foolish to leave him; he is worth millions now.” “Heaven above us!” cried the mother. “What did I tell her when she behaved so badly to him, and he as mild as milk, poor old fellow? Oh! didn’t she just give it him hot?--Olympe was perverted, madame?” “But how?” “She got to know a _claqueur_, madame, saving your presence, a man paid to clap, you know, the grand nephew of an old mattress-picker of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. This good-for-naught, as all your good-looking fellows are, paid to make a piece go, is the cock of the walk out on the Boulevard du Temple, where he works up the new plays, and takes care that the actresses get a reception, as he calls it. First, he has a good breakfast in the morning; then, before the play, he dines, to be ‘up to the mark,’ as he says; in short, he is a born lover of billiards and drams. ‘But that is not following a trade,’ as I said to Olympe.” “It is a trade men follow, unfortunately,” said Josepha. “Well, the rascal turned Olympe’s head, and he, madame, did not keep good company--when I tell you he was very near being nabbed by the police in a tavern where thieves meet. ‘Wever, Monsieur Braulard, the leader of the claque, got him out of that. He wears gold earrings, and he lives by doing nothing, hanging on to women, who are fools about these good-looking scamps. He spent all the money Monsieur Thoul used to give the child.