"Bless me! you speak to me of money? You chant your ruin to me! The _De
Profundis_ of your money-box, should I know that? I question with myself
as to what it means!--However, knowing you to be financially
embarrassed, I have myself found you help--Yes, I told someone who
understands how to extricate business men, that you were embarrassed!"
"I?"
"There is nothing to blush about. I told Molina the _Tumbler_--You know
him?"
Did he know him! At that very moment he saw the ruddy gold moon that
represented the banker's face amid all the expanse of his shining flesh.
He trembled as if in the face of temptation.
"Molina is a man of means," said Marianne. "If you need money, you can
have it there! And now, once more, leave me to my new life! The past is
as if it had never been!--_Bonjour, Bonsoir!_--and adieu, go!--Give me
your hand!"
She smiled so strangely, half lying on the divan, and stretched out her
white hand, which he covered with kisses, murmuring:
"Well, yes, adieu! Yes, adieu!--But once more--once!--this evening--I
love you so dearly!--Will you?"
She quietly reached out her bare arm toward a silk bell-rope that she
jerked suddenly and Vaudrey rose enraged and humiliated.
"Show Monsieur Vaudrey out," Marianne said to Justine, as she appeared
at the door. "Then you may go to bed, my girl!"
Vaudrey left this woman's house in a fit of frenzy. She had just treated
him who had paid for the divan on which she was reclining as a genuine
duchess might have treated a man who had been insolently disrespectful
toward her. He was almost inclined to laugh at it.
"It is well done! well done for you! Ah! the dolt! To trust a wanton! To
trust Warcolier! To trust everybody! To trust everybody except
Adrienne!--"
He, mechanically and without thought, resumed the way to Place Beauvau,
forgetting that the ministerial home was no longer his. The porter--who
knows? might not have opened the gate to him. The lackeys would have
driven him off as the girl had done whom he had paid, yes, paid, paid!
For she was a harlot, nothing more!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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