To Pierrette’s great astonishment Sylvie sent her to dress in her best clothes after dinner.  The liveliest imagination is never up to the level of the activity which suspicion excites in the mind of an old maid.  In this particular case, this particular old maid carried the day against politicians, lawyers, notaries, and all other self-interests.  Sylvie determined to consult Vinet, after examining herself into all the suspicious circumstances.  She kept Pierrette close to her, so as to find out from the girl’s face whether the colonel had told her the truth.

On this particular evening the Chargeboeuf ladies were the first to arrive.  Bathilde, by Vinet’s advice, had become more elaborate in her dress.  She now wore a charming gown of blue velveteen, with the same transparent fichu, garnet pendants in her ears, her hair in ringlets, the wily jeannette round her throat, black satin slippers, gray silk stockings, and gants de Suede; add to these things the manners of a queen and the coquetry of a young girl determined to capture Rogron.  Her mother, calm and dignified, retained, as did her daughter, a certain aristocratic insolence, with which the two women hedged themselves and preserved the spirit of their caste.  Bathilde was a woman of intelligence, a fact which Vinet alone had discovered during the two months’ stay the ladies had made at his house.  When he had fully fathomed the mind of the girl, wounded and disappointed as it was by the fruitlessness of her beauty and her youth, and enlightened by the contempt she felt for the men of a period in which money was the only idol, Vinet, himself surprised, exclaimed,—­

“If I could only have married you, Bathilde, I should to-day be Keeper of the Seals.  I should call myself Vinet de Chargeboeuf, and take my seat as deputy of the Right.”

Bathilde had no vulgar idea in her marriage intentions.  She did not marry to be a mother, nor to possess a husband; she married for freedom, to gain a responsible position, to be called “madame,” and to act as men act.  Rogron was nothing but a name to her; she expected to make something of the fool,—­a voting deputy, for instance, whose instigator she would be; moreover, she longed to avenge herself on her family, who had taken no notice of a girl without money.  Vinet had much enlarged and strengthened her ideas by admiring and approving them.

“My dear Bathilde,” he said, while explaining to her the influence of women, and showing her the sphere of action in which she ought to work, “do you suppose that Tiphaine, a man of the most ordinary capacity, could ever get to be a judge of the Royal court in Paris by himself?  No, it is Madame Tiphaine who has got him elected deputy, and it is she who will push him when they get to Paris.  Her mother, Madame Roguin, is a shrewd woman, who does what she likes with the famous banker du Tillet, a crony of Nucingen, and both of them allies of the Kellers.  The administration is on the best of terms with those