“You cannot mean to say that in four years you have incurred a million and a half of debt?”

“Nothing is more certain, Mathias.  Did I not give those diamonds to my wife?  Did I not spend the hundred and fifty thousand I received from the sale of Madame Evangelista’s house, in the arrangement of my house in Paris?  Was I not forced to use other money for the first payments on that property demanded by the marriage contract?  I was even forced to sell out Natalie’s forty thousand a year in the Funds to complete the purchase of Auzac and Saint-Froult.  We sold at eighty-seven, therefore I became in debt for over two hundred thousand francs within a month after my marriage.  That left us only sixty-seven thousand francs a year; but we spent fully three times as much every year.  Add all that up, together with rates of interest to usurers, and you will soon find a million.”

“Br-r-r!” exclaimed the old notary.  “Go on.  What next?”

“Well, I wanted, in the first place, to complete for my wife that set of jewels of which she had the pearl necklace clasped by the family diamond, the ‘Discreto,’ and her mother’s ear-rings.  I paid a hundred thousand francs for a coronet of diamond wheat-ears.  There’s eleven hundred thousand.  And now I find I owe the fortune of my wife, which amounts to three hundred and sixty-six thousand francs of her ‘dot.’”

“But,” said Mathias, “if Madame la comtesse had given up her diamonds and you had pledged your income you could have pacified your creditors and have paid them off in time.”

“When a man is down, Mathias, when his property is covered with mortgages, when his wife’s claims take precedence of his creditors’, and when that man has notes out for a hundred thousand francs which he must pay (and I hope I can do so out of the increased value of my property here), what you propose is not possible.”

“This is dreadful!” cried Mathias; “would you sell Belle-Rose with the vintage of 1825 still in the cellars?”

“I cannot help myself.”

“Belle-Rose is worth six hundred thousand francs.”

“Natalie will buy it in; I have advised her to do so.”

“I might push the price to seven hundred thousand, and the farms are worth a hundred thousand each.”

“Then if the house in Bordeaux can be sold for two hundred thousand—­”

“Solonet will give more than that; he wants it.  He is retiring with a handsome property made by gambling on the Funds.  He has sold his practice for three hundred thousand francs, and marries a mulatto woman.  God knows how she got her money, but they say it amounts to millions.  A notary gambling in stocks! a notary marrying a black woman!  What an age!  It is said that he speculates for your mother-in-law with her funds.”

“She has greatly improved Lanstrac and taken great pains with its cultivation.  She has amply repaid me for the use of it.”

“I shouldn’t have thought her capable of that.”