Mme. de Marville, ignorant and vain, was unwilling to appear to receive the slightest trifle from the parasite; and here her ignorance served her admirably, she did not even know the name of Watteau.  And, on the other hand, if anything can measure the extent of the collector’s passion, which, in truth, is one of the most deeply seated of all passions, rivaling the very vanity of the author—­if anything can give an idea of the lengths to which a collector will go, it is the audacity which Pons displayed on this occasion, as he held his own against his lady cousin for the first time in twenty years.  He was amazed at his own boldness.  He made Cecile see the beauties of the delicate carving on the sticks of this wonder, and as he talked to her his face grew serene and gentle again.  But without some sketch of the Presidente, it is impossible fully to understand the perturbation of heart from which Pons suffered.

Mme. de Marville had been short and fair, plump and fresh; at forty-six she was as short as ever, but she looked dried up.  An arched forehead and thin lips, that had been softly colored once, lent a soured look to a face naturally disdainful, and now grown hard and unpleasant with a long course of absolute domestic rule.  Time had deepened her fair hair to a harsh chestnut hue; the pride of office, intensified by suppressed envy, looked out of eyes that had lost none of their brightness nor their satirical expression.  As a matter of fact, Mme. Camusot de Marville felt almost poor in the society of self-made wealthy bourgeois with whom Pons dined.  She could not forgive the rich retail druggist, ex-president of the Commercial Court, for his successive elevations as deputy, member of the Government, count and peer of France.  She could not forgive her father-in-law for putting himself forward instead of his eldest son as deputy of his arrondissement after Popinot’s promotion to the peerage.  After eighteen years of services in Paris, she was still waiting for the post of Councillor of the Court of Cassation for her husband.  It was Camusot’s own incompetence, well known at the Law Courts, which excluded him from the Council.  The Home Secretary of 1844 even regretted Camusot’s nomination to the presidency of the Court of Indictments in 1834, though, thanks to his past experience as an examining magistrate, he made himself useful in drafting decrees.

These disappointments had told upon Mme. de Marville, who, moreover, had formed a tolerably correct estimate of her husband.  A temper naturally shrewish was soured till she grew positively terrible.  She was not old, but she had aged; she deliberately set herself to extort by fear all that the world was inclined to refuse her, and was harsh and rasping as a file.  Caustic to excess she had few friends among women; she surrounded herself with prim, elderly matrons of her own stamp, who lent each other mutual support, and people stood in awe of her.  As for poor Pons, his relations with this fiend in petticoats were very much those of a schoolboy with the master whose one idea of communication is the ferule.