And as Aunt Medea, having obtained all she desired, stammered an excuse: 

“Nonsense!” Blanche exclaimed; “let us forget this foolish quarrel.  You forgive me, do you not?”

And the two ladies embraced each other with the greatest effusion, like two friends united after a misunderstanding.  But Aunt Medea was as far from being deceived by this mock reconciliation as the clearsighted Blanche.

“It will be best for me to keep on the qui vive,” thought the humble relative.  “God only knows with what intense joy my dear niece would send me to join Marie-Anne.”

Perhaps a similar thought flitted through the mind of Mme. Blanche.

She felt as a convict might feel on seeing his most execrated enemy, perhaps the man who had betrayed him, fastened to the other end of his chain.

“I am bound now and forever to this dangerous and perfidious creature,” she thought.  “I am no longer my own mistress; I belong to her.  When she commands, I must obey.  I must be the slave of her every caprice—­and she has forty years of humiliation and servitude to avenge.”

The prospect of such a life made her tremble; and she racked her brain to discover some way of freeing herself from her detested companion.

Would it be possible to inspire Aunt Medea with a desire to live independently in her own house, served by her own servants?

Might she succeed in persuading this silly old woman, who still longed for finery and ball-dresses, to marry?  A handsome marriage-portion will always attract a husband.

But, in either case, Blanche would require money—­a large sum of money, for whose use she would be accountable to no one.

This conviction made her resolve to take possession of about two hundred and fifty thousand francs, in bank-notes and coin, belonging to her father.

This sum represented the savings of the Marquis de Courtornieu during the past three years.  No one knew he had laid it aside, except his daughter; and now that he had lost his reason, Blanche, who knew where the hoard was concealed, could take it for her own use without the slightest danger.

“With this,” she thought, “I can at any moment enrich Aunt Medea without having recourse to Martial.”

After this little scene there was a constant interchange of delicate attentions and touching devotion between the two ladies.  It was “my dearest little aunt,” and “my dearly beloved niece,” from morning until night; and the gossips of the neighborhood, who had often commented upon the haughty disdain which Mme. Blanche displayed in her treatment of her relative, would have found abundant food for comment had they known that Aunt Medea was protected from the possibility of cold by a mantle lined with costly fur, exactly like the marquise’s own, and that she made the journey, not in the large Berlin, with the servants, but in the post-chaise with the Marquis and Marquise de Sairmeuse.