The occasion was excellent to add up the spendings of the handsome widow and prove, categorically, her ruin.  Rumors were so rife that bets were made for and against the marriage.  By the laws of worldly jurisprudence this gossip was not allowed to reach the ears of the parties concerned.  No one was enemy or friend enough to Paul or to Madame Evangelista to inform either of what was being said.  Paul had some business at Lanstrac, and used the occasion to make a hunting-party for several of the young men of Bordeaux,—­a sort of farewell, as it were, to his bachelor life.  This hunting party was accepted by society as a signal confirmation of public suspicion.

When this event occurred, Madame de Gyas, who had a daughter to marry, thought it high time to sound the matter, and to condole, with joyful heart, the blow received by the Evangelistas.  Natalie and her mother were somewhat surprised to see the lengthened face of the marquise, and they asked at once if anything distressing had happened to her.

“Can it be,” she replied, “that you are ignorant of the rumors that are circulating?  Though I think them false myself, I have come to learn the truth in order to stop this gossip, at any rate among the circle of my own friends.  To be the dupes or the accomplices of such an error is too false a position for true friends to occupy.”

“But what is it? what has happened?” asked mother and daughter.

Madame de Gyas thereupon allowed herself the happiness of repeating all the current gossip, not sparing her two friends a single stab.  Natalie and Madame Evangelista looked at each other and laughed, but they fully understood the meaning of the tale and the motives of their friend.  The Spanish lady took her revenge very much as Celimene took hers on Arsinoe.

“My dear, are you ignorant—­you who know the provinces so well—­can you be ignorant of what a mother is capable when she has on her hands a daughter whom she cannot marry for want of ‘dot’ and lovers, want of beauty, want of mind, and, sometimes, want of everything?  Why, a mother in that position would rob a diligence or commit a murder, or wait for a man at the corner of a street—­she would sacrifice herself twenty times over, if she was a mother at all.  Now, as you and I both know, there are many such in that situation in Bordeaux, and no doubt they attribute to us their own thoughts and actions.  Naturalists have depicted the habits and customs of many ferocious animals, but they have forgotten the mother and daughter in quest of a husband.  Such women are hyenas, going about, as the Psalmist says, seeking whom they may devour, and adding to the instinct of the brute the intellect of man, and the genius of woman.  I can understand that those little spiders, Mademoiselle de Belor, Mademoiselle de Trans, and others, after working so long at their webs without catching a fly, without so much as hearing a buzz, should be furious; I can even forgive their