“‘It is hard!’ he said.

“‘What is hard?’ asked Madame Babette, after she had paused for a time, to enable him to add to, or to finish, his sentence, if he pleased.

“‘It is hard for a man to love a woman as I do,’ he went on—­’I did not seek to love her, it came upon me before I was aware—­before I had ever thought about it at all, I loved her better than all the world beside.  All my life, before I knew her, seems a dull blank.  I neither know nor care for what I did before then.  And now there are just two lives before me.  Either I have her, or I have not.  That is all:  but that is everything.  And what can I do to make her have me?  Tell me, aunt,’ and he caught at Madame Babette’s arm, and gave it so sharp a shake, that she half screamed out, Pierre said, and evidently grew alarmed at her nephew’s excitement.

“‘Hush, Victor!’ said she.  ’There are other women in the world, if this one will not have you.’

“‘None other for me,’ he said, sinking back as if hopeless.  ’I am plain and coarse, not one of the scented darlings of the aristocrats.  Say that I am ugly, brutish; I did not make myself so, any more than I made myself love her.  It is my fate.  But am I to submit to the consequences of my fate without a struggle?  Not I. As strong as my love is, so strong is my will.  It can be no stronger,’ continued he, gloomily.  ’Aunt Babette, you must help me—­you must make her love me.’  He was so fierce here, that Pierre said he did not wonder that his mother was frightened.

“‘I, Victor!’ she exclaimed.  ’I make her love you?  How can I?  Ask me to speak for you to Mademoiselle Didot, or to Mademoiselle Cauchois even, or to such as they, and I’ll do it, and welcome.  But to Mademoiselle de Crequy, why you don’t know the difference!  Those people—­the old nobility I mean—­why they don’t know a man from a dog, out of their own rank!  And no wonder, for the young gentlemen of quality are treated differently to us from their very birth.  If she had you to-morrow, you would be miserable.  Let me alone for knowing the aristocracy.  I have not been a concierge to a duke and three counts for nothing.  I tell you, all your ways are different to her ways.’

“‘I would change my “ways,” as you call them.’

“‘Be reasonable, Victor.’

“’No, I will not be reasonable, if by that you mean giving her up.  I tell you two lives are before me; one with her, one without her.  But the latter will be but a short career for both of us.  You said, aunt, that the talk went in the conciergerie of her father’s hotel, that she would have nothing to do with this cousin whom I put out of the way to-day?’

“’So the servants said.  How could I know?  All I know is, that he left off coming to our hotel, and that at one time before then he had never been two days absent.’

“’So much the better for him.  He suffers now for having come between me and my object—­in trying to snatch her away out of my sight.  Take you warning, Pierre!  I did not like your meddling to-night.’  And so he went off, leaving Madam Babette rocking herself backwards and forwards, in all the depression of spirits consequent upon the reaction after the brandy, and upon her knowledge of her nephew’s threatened purpose combined.