"I believe you, my child. And now, sir, listen to me, for four years have I been deceived by the belief that my daughter was happy. I now know the truth, Bertha has no other support than myself, a poor, old and infirm man; but still there is strength enough left me to bid you beware." "Oh, then to advice and lectures succeed threats and menaces? What next, sir?" "At least, henceforward, we plainly understand our relative situations; and, first, from this hour I reject the pecuniary aid I accepted at your hands, solely at the solicitations of my daughter." "You find it more convenient to be ungrateful?" "Ungrateful! for having sacrificed my own notions to spare your pride?" "Father, I conjure you----" "Thus, then, sir," continued Pierre Raimond, "we meet upon equal grounds, as man and man; as such you shall account to me for the misery heaped on my gentle my unoffending child; I give you a fortnight to repair the wrongs you have done her." "Really, a fortnight; can you not make it more?" "And if, at the end of that period, you do not conduct yourself as honour and justice require, towards Bertha----" "Well, sir, and what then?" "You shall see." "Come, madam," said M. de Brévannes, taking his wife by the arm. "Farewell, dearest father; I pray you calm yourself; I will soon come again." "That is, if I think proper to permit you," said M. de Brévannes, with bitter irony. "Make yourself easy, my child; your father will watch over and protect you," cried Pierre Raimond, weeping bitterly. Bertha followed her husband out, and the old man was left alone. CHAPTER XIII A FIRST REPRESENTATION The Comédie Française had announced for the present evening the first performance of "_The Seducer_," a five-act comedy in verse. This piece was the first literary effort of the Vicomte de Gercourt. Still extremely young and quite the fashion, possessed of a highly prepossessing and agreeable person, he justly passed in the world for a man of talent, an agreeable and entertaining companion, and a person of unquestioned honour in every transaction in which he was concerned. Consequently the first representation of his comedy had attracted all the higher circles of Paris, to which he belonged.