The preparations for this event required over a month, and it was called the fete of the camellias.  Immense quantities of that beautiful flower were massed on the staircase, and in the antechamber and supper-room.  During this month the formalities for constituting the entail were concluded in Paris; the estates adjoining Lanstrac were purchased, the banns were published, and all doubts finally dissipated.  Friends and enemies thought only of preparing their toilets for the coming fete.

The time occupied by these events obscured the difficulties raised by the first discussion, and swept into oblivion the words and arguments of that stormy conference.  Neither Paul nor his mother-in-law continued to think of them.  Were they not, after all, as Madame Evangelista had said, the affair of the two notaries?

But—­to whom has it never happened, when life is in its fullest flow, to be suddenly changed by the voice of memory, raised, perhaps, too late, reminding us of some important new fact, some threatened danger?  On the morning of the day when the contract was to be signed and the fete given, one of these flashes of the soul illuminated the mind of Madame Evangelista during the semi-somnolence of her waking hour.  The words that she herself had uttered at the moment when Mathias acceded to Solonet’s conditions, “Questa coda non e di questo gatto,” were cried aloud in her mind by that voice of memory.  In spite of her incapacity for business, Madame Evangelista’s shrewdness told her:—­

“If so clever a notary as Mathias was pacified, it must have been that he saw compensation at the cost of some one.”

That some one could not be Paul, as she had blindly hoped.  Could it be that her daughter’s fortune was to pay the costs of war?  She resolved to demand explanations on the tenor of the contract, not reflecting on the course she would have to take in case she found her interests seriously compromised.  This day had so powerful an influence on Paul de Manerville’s conjugal life that it is necessary to explain certain of the external circumstances which accompanied it.

Madame Evangelista had shrunk from no expense for this dazzling fete.  The court-yard was gravelled and converted into a tent, and filled with shrubs, although it was winter.  The camellias, of which so much had been said from Angouleme to Dax, were banked on the staircase and in the vestibules.  Wall partitions had disappeared to enlarge the supper-room and the ball-room where the dancing was to be.  Bordeaux, a city famous for the luxury of colonial fortunes, was on a tiptoe of expectation for this scene of fairyland.  About eight o’clock, as the last discussion of the contract was taking place within the house, the inquisitive populace, anxious to see the ladies in full dress getting out of their carriages, formed in two hedges on either side of the porte-cochere.  Thus the sumptuous atmosphere of a fete acted upon all minds at the moment