Already, however, there were two hundred thousand francs' worth of promissory notes signed by her which barely cost him one hundred and ten thousand. After having these bills endorsed by Larsonneau to whose order they were made payable, he placed them in circulation in a prudent manner, intending to employ them as decisive weapons later on. He would never have been able to hold out to the end of that terrible winter, to lend his wife money usuriously and keep up his style of living, but for the sale of his ground on the Boulevard Malesherbes, which Messieurs Mignon and Charrier paid him for in hard cash, retaining, however, a formidable discount. For Renée this same winter was one long joy. Lack of money was her only suffering. Maxime cost her very dear; he still treated her as a stepmother, and allowed her to pay everywhere. But this hidden poverty was an additional delight for her. She exercised her wits and racked her brain, so that her dear child should want for nothing; and when she had prevailed upon her husband to find her a few thousand francs, she and her lover expended them in some costly folly, like two schoolboys let loose on their first escapade. When they were hard up they remained at home and derived their enjoyment from this large building of such new and insolently stupid luxury. The father was never there. The lovers sat by the fireside more frequently than formerly. The fact was, that Renée had filled the icy emptiness of the gilded ceilings with a warm enjoyment. The suspicious abode of worldly pleasure had become a chapel in which she secretly practised a new religion. Maxime did not merely lend to her nature that high note which harmonized with her mad dresses. He was the very lover fitted to this mansion, with broad windows like shop fronts, and which a flood of sculpture inundated from garret to cellar. He animated all this plaster, from the two podgy Cupids who let a stream of water flow from their shell in the courtyard, to the tall, naked women supporting the balconies, and playing with apples and ears of corn, amid the pediments. He explained the unduly ornate hall, the tiny dimensions of the garden, the dazzling rooms in which one saw too many arm-chairs, and not one work of art. The young woman who had formerly felt bored to death in the house, suddenly began to amuse herself there, and availed herself of it, just as she might have done with something, the use of which she had not understood at first. And it was not only through her own apartments, through the buttercup drawing-room, and the conservatory that she promenaded her love, but through the entire mansion. She even ended by finding an enjoyment in lying on the divan of the smoking-room. She forgot herself there, and declared that the vague smell of tobacco pervading the apartment was very agreeable.