“Solonet tells me that the bride and bridegroom leave for Paris to-morrow morning, all alone.”

“Madame Evangelista was to live with them, I thought.”

“Count Paul has got rid of her already.”

“What a mistake!” said the Marquise de Gyas.  “To shut the door on the mother of his wife is to open it to a lover.  Doesn’t he know what a mother is?”

“He has been very hard on Madame Evangelista; the poor woman has had to sell her house and her diamonds, and is going to live at Lanstrac.”

“Natalie looks very sad.”

“Would you like to be made to take a journey the day after your marriage?”

“It is very awkward.”

“I am glad I came here to-night,” said a lady.  “I am now convinced of the necessity of the pomps of marriage and of wedding fetes; a scene like this is very bare and sad.  If I may say what I think,” she added, in a whisper to her neighbor, “this marriage seems to me indecent.”

Madame Evangelista took Natalie in her carriage and accompanied her, alone, to Paul’s house.

“Well, mother, it is done!”

“Remember, my dear child, my last advice, and you will be a happy woman.  Be his wife, and not his mistress.”

When Natalie had retired, the mother played the little comedy of flinging herself with tears into the arms of her son-in-law.  It was the only provincial thing that Madame Evangelista allowed herself, but she had her reasons for it.  Amid tears and speeches, apparently half wild and despairing, she obtained of Paul those concessions which all husbands make.

The next day she put the married pair into their carriage, and accompanied them to the ferry, by which the road to Paris crosses the Gironde.  With a look and a word Natalie enabled her mother to see that if Paul had won the trick in the game of the contract, her revenge was beginning.  Natalie was already reducing her husband to perfect obedience.

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

Five years later, on an afternoon in the month of November, Comte Paul de Manerville, wrapped in a cloak, was entering, with a bowed head and a mysterious manner, the house of his old friend Monsieur Mathias at Bordeaux.

Too old to continue in business, the worthy notary had sold his practice and was ending his days peacefully in a quiet house to which he had retired.  An urgent affair had obliged him to be absent at the moment of his guest’s arrival, but his housekeeper, warned of Paul’s coming, took him to the room of the late Madame Mathias, who had been dead a year.  Fatigued by a rapid journey, Paul slept till evening.  When the old man reached home he went up to his client’s room, and watched him sleeping, as a mother watches her child.  Josette, the old housekeeper, followed her master and stood before the bed, her hands on her hips.