For more than six months her husband had given her no money for the household expenses.  She sold secretly, in Paris, the handsome diamond ornaments her brother had given her on her marriage, and placed the family on a footing of the strictest economy.  She sent away the governess of her children, and even the nurse of little Jean.  Formerly the luxury of carriages and horses was unknown among the burgher families, so simple were they in their habits, so proud in their feelings; no provision for that modern innovation had therefore been made at the House of Claes, and Balthazar was obliged to have his stable and coach-house in a building opposite to his own house:  his present occupations allowed him no time to superintend that portion of his establishment, which belongs exclusively to men.  Madame Claes suppressed the whole expense of equipages and servants, which her present isolation from the world rendered unnecessary, and she did so without pretending to conceal the retrenchment under any pretext.  So far, facts had contradicted her assertions, and silence for the future was more becoming:  indeed the change in the family mode of living called for no explanation in a country where, as in Flanders, any one who lives up to his income is considered a madman.

And yet, as her eldest daughter, Marguerite, approached her sixteenth birthday, Madame Claes longed to procure for her a good marriage, and to place her in society in a manner suitable to a daughter of the Molinas, the Van Ostron-Temnincks, and the Casa-Reals.  A few days before the one on which this story opens, the money derived from the sale of the diamonds had been exhausted.  On the very day, at three o’clock in the afternoon, as Madame Claes was taking her children to vespers, she met Pierquin, who was on his way to see her, and who turned and accompanied her to the church, talking in a low voice of her situation.

“My dear cousin,” he said, “unless I fail in the friendship which binds me to your family, I cannot conceal from you the peril of your position, nor refrain from begging you to speak to your husband.  Who but you can hold him back from the gulf into which he is plunging?  The rents from the mortgaged estates are not enough to pay the interest on the sums he has borrowed.  If he cuts the wood on them he destroys your last chance of safety in the future.  My cousin Balthazar owes at this moment thirty thousand francs to the house of Protez and Chiffreville.  How can you pay them?  What will you live on?  If Claes persists in sending for reagents, retorts, voltaic batteries, and other such playthings, what will become of you?  Your whole property, except the house and furniture, has been dissipated in gas and carbon; yesterday he talked of mortgaging the house, and in answer to a remark of mine, he cried out, ‘The devil!’ It was the first sign of reason I have known him show for three years.”

Madame Claes pressed the notary’s arm, and said in a tone of suffering, “Keep it secret.”