Solonet, the man of elegance and good taste, began to laugh.

“I’ll translate it for you,” said Mathias.  “If your children are wise they will think of the future.  To think of the future means laying by half our income, provided we have only two children, to whom we are bound to give a fine education and a handsome dowry.  Your daughter and son-in-law will, therefore, be reduced to live on twenty thousand francs a year, though each has spent fifty thousand while still unmarried.  But that is nothing.  The law obliges my client to account, hereafter, to his children for the eleven hundred and fifty-six thousand francs of their mother’s patrimony; yet he may not have received them if his wife should die and madame should survive her, which may very well happen.  To sign such a contract is to fling one’s self into the river, bound hand and foot.  You wish to make your daughter happy, do you not?  If she loves her husband, a fact which notaries never doubt, she will share his troubles.  Madame, I see enough in this scheme to make her die of grief and anxiety; you are consigning her to poverty.  Yes, madame, poverty; to persons accustomed to the use of one hundred thousand francs a year, twenty thousand is poverty.  Moreover, if Monsieur le comte, out of love for his wife, were guilty of extravagance, she could ruin him by exercising her rights when misfortunes overtook him.  I plead now for you, for them, for their children, for every one.”

“The old fellow makes a lot of smoke with his cannon,” thought Maitre Solonet, giving his client a look, which meant, “Keep on!”

“There is one way of combining all interests,” replied Madame Evangelista, calmly.  “I can reserve to myself only the necessary cost of living in a convent, and my children can have my property at once.  I can renounce the world, if such anticipated death conduces to the welfare of my daughter.”

“Madame,” said the old notary, “let us take time to consider and weigh, deliberately, the course we had best pursue to conciliate all interests.”

“Good heavens! monsieur,” cried Madame Evangelista, who saw defeat in delay, “everything has already been considered and weighed.  I was ignorant of what the process of marriage is in France; I am a Spaniard and a Creole.  I did not know that in order to marry my daughter it was necessary to reckon up the days which God may still grant me; that my child would suffer because I live; that I do harm by living, and by having lived!  When my husband married me I had nothing but my name and my person.  My name alone was a fortune to him, which dwarfed his own.  What wealth can equal that of a great name?  My dowry was beauty, virtue, happiness, birth, education.  Can money give those treasures?  If Natalie’s father could overhear this conversation, his generous soul would be wounded forever, and his happiness in paradise destroyed.  I dissipated, foolishly, perhaps, a few of his millions without a quiver ever coming to his eyelids.  Since his death, I have grown economical and orderly in comparison with the life he encouraged me to lead—­Come, let us break this thing off!  Monsieur de Manerville is so disappointed that I—­”