Madame de la Roche-Jugan had invented an original way of making herself agreeable to the General, which was to persuade him he had disease of the heart.  She continually felt his pulse with her plump hand, sometimes reassuring him, and at others inspiring him with a salutary terror, although he denied it.

“Good heavens! my dear cousin!” he would exclaim, “let me alone.  I know I am mortal like everybody else.  What of that?  But I see your aim-it is to convert me!  Ta-ta!”

She not only wished to convert him, but to marry him, and bury him besides.

She based her hopes in this respect chiefly on her son Sigismund; knowing that the General bitterly regretted having no one to inherit his name.  He had but to marry Madame de la Roche-Jugan and adopt her son to banish this care.  Without a single allusion to this fact, the Countess failed not to turn the thoughts of the General toward it with all the tact of an accomplished intrigante, with all the ardor of a mother, and with all the piety of an unctuous devotee.

Her sister, the Baroness Tonnelier, bitterly confessed her own disadvantage.  She was not a widow.  And she had no son.  But she had two daughters, both of them graceful, very elegant and sparkling.  One was Madame Bacquiere, the wife of a broker; the other, Madame Van-Cuyp, wife of a young Hollander, doing business at Paris.

Both interpreted life and marriage gayly; both floated from one year into another dancing, riding, hunting, coquetting, and singing recklessly the most risque songs of the minor theatres.  Formerly, Camors, in his pensive mood, had taken an aversion to these little examples of modern feminine frivolity.  Since he had changed his views of life he did them more justice.  He said, calmly: 

“They are pretty little animals that follow their instincts.”

Mesdames Bacquiere and Van-Cuyp, instigated by their mother, applied themselves assiduously to making the General feel all the sacred joys that cluster round the domestic hearth.  They enlivened his household, exercised his horses, killed his game, and tortured his piano.  They seemed to think that the General, once accustomed to their sweetness and animation, could not do without it, and that their society would become indispensable to him.  They mingled, too, with their adroit manoeuvres, familiar and delicate attentions, likely to touch an old man.  They sat on his knees like children, played gently with his moustache, and arranged in the latest style the military knot of his cravat.

Madame de la Roche-Jugan never ceased to deplore confidentially to the General the unfortunate education of her nieces; while the Baroness, on her side, lost no opportunity of holding up in bold relief the emptiness, impertinence, and sulkiness of young Count Sigismund.