Thus, at twenty-eight years of age, the Rabouilleuse felt for the first time a true love, an idolatrous love, the love which includes all ways of loving,—­that of Gulnare and that of Medora.  As soon as the penniless officer found out the respective situations of Flore and Jean-Jacques Rouget, he saw something more desirable than an “amourette” in an intimacy with the Rabouilleuse.  He asked nothing better for his future prosperity than to take up his abode at the Rouget’s, recognizing perfectly the feeble nature of the old bachelor.  Flore’s passion necessarily affected the life and household affairs of her master.  For a month the old man, now grown excessively timid, saw the laughing and kindly face of his mistress change to something terrible and gloomy and sullen.  He was made to endure flashes of angry temper purposely displayed, precisely like a married man whose wife is meditating an infidelity.  When, after some cruel rebuff, he nerved himself to ask Flore the reason of the change, her eyes were so full of hatred, and her voice so aggressive and contemptuous, that the poor creature quailed under them.

“Good heavens!” she cried; “you have neither heart nor soul!  Here’s sixteen years that I have spent my youth in this house, and I have only just found out that you have got a stone there (striking her breast).  For two months you have seen before your eyes that brave captain, a victim of the Bourbons, who was cut out for a general, and is down in the depths of poverty, hunted into a hole of a place where there’s no way to make a penny of money!  He’s forced to sit on a stool all day in the mayor’s office to earn—­what?  Six hundred miserable francs,—­a fine thing, indeed!  And here are you, with six hundred and fifty-nine thousand well invested, and sixty thousand francs’ income, —­thanks to me, who never spend more than three thousand a year, everything included, even my own clothes, yes, everything!—­and you never think of offering him a home here, though there’s the second floor empty!  You’d rather the rats and mice ran riot in it than put a human being there,—­and he a lad your father always allowed to be his own son!  Do you want to know what you are?  I’ll tell you,—­a fratricide!  And I know why, too.  You see I take an interest in him, and that provokes you.  Stupid as you seem, you have got more spite in you than the spitefullest of men.  Well, yes!  I do take an interest in him, and a keen one—­”

“But, Flore—­”

“‘But, Flore’, indeed!  What’s that got to do with it?  You may go and find another Flore (if you can!), for I hope this glass of wine may poison me if I don’t get away from your dungeon of a house.  I haven’t, God be thanked! cost you one penny during the twelve years I’ve been with you, and you have had the pleasure of my company into the bargain.  I could have earned my own living anywhere with the work that I’ve done here,—­washing, ironing, looking after the linen, going to market, cooking, taking care of your interests before everything, slaving myself to death from morning till night,—­and this is my reward!”