delight. Larsonneau watched them philosophically as he folded up the bills, and replaced the inkstand and the penholder in his pocket.
Laure was still with her arms round Rozan’s neck, when Aristide Saccard lifted a corner of the door-hangings.
“That’s right, don’t mind me,” he said, laughing.
The duc blushed. But Laure went and shook hands with the financier, exchanging a wink of intelligence with him. She was radiant.
“It’s done, my dear,” she said; “I warned you. You’re not very angry with me?”
Saccard shrugged his shoulders goodnaturedly. He pulled back the hangings, and standing aside to allow Laure and the duc to pass, he cried, in the shrill voice of a gentleman-usher:
“Monsieur the duc, madame the duchesse!”
This joke met with immense success. The newspapers printed it the next day, giving Laure d’Aurigny’s real name, and describing the two men by very transparent initials. The rupture between Aristide Saccard and the fat Laure caused even more stir than their pretended love-affair.
Meantime Saccard had let fall the curtain on the burst of merriment which his joke had occasioned in the drawingroom.
“Eh! what a jolly girl!” he said, turning towards Larsonneau. “And so depraved!… It’s you, you scamp, who get the most out of all this. What are you to have?”
But the other protested with smiles; and he pulled down his shirt-cuffs, which were working up. At last he came and sat down near the door on a couch to which Saccard beckoned him.
“Come here, I don’t want to confess you, dash it all!… Let’s get to serious business, old chap. I had a long conversation with my wife tonight…. It’s all settled.”
“Does she consent to transfer her share?” asked Larsonneau.
“Yes, but it was not without difficulty…. Women are so obstinate! You know my wife had promised an old aunt of hers not to sell out. There was no end to her scruples…. Fortunately I had a quite unanswerable story ready.”
He rose to light a cigar at the candle which Laure had left on the table, and returning stretched himself at his ease on the couch:
“I told my wife,” he continued, “that you were completely ruined…. You had gambled on the Bourse, squandered your money on women, plunged into stupid speculations: in short, you are on the verge of a terrible bankruptcy…. I even gave her to understand that I did not consider you perfectly honest…. Then I explained to her that the Charonne affair would be swallowed up in your disaster, and that the best would be for her to accept the proposal you had made me to release her and to buy her out for an old song, no doubt.”
“I don’t call that clever,” muttered the expropriation-agent. “Do you think your wife will believe such rot as that?”
Saccard smiled. He was in one of his communicative moods.
“How simple you are, my dear fellow!” he resumed. “What has the plot of the story to do with it? It’s the details, the gesture, the accent: that’s the thing. Call Rozan over, and I bet I persuade him it’s broad daylight. And my wife has no more brains than Rozan…. I gave her a glimpse of an abyss. She has no suspicion of the coming expropriation. As she expressed surprise that in the midst of a catastrophe you could think of taking over a still heavier burden, I told her that she no doubt stood in the way of some ugly trick you proposed to play your creditors…. At last I advised her to consent, as being the only way to avoid being mixed up in endless lawsuits and to get some money out of her property.”
Larsonneau still thought the story rather clumsy. His own method was less melodramatic; each of his transactions was put together and unravelled with all the elegance of a drawingroom comedy.
“Personally, I should have thought of something different,” he said. “However, everyone has his own system…. So all we have to do now is to pay up.”
“It is on this subject,” replied Saccard, “that I want to come to an arrangement with you…. Tomorrow I will take the deed of transfer to my wife, and she will only have to send you this deed in order to receive the stipulated price…. I prefer to avoid an interview.”
As a matter of fact he had never allowed Larsonneau to visit them on an intimate footing. He did not ask him to the house, and he went with him to Renée whenever it was absolutely necessary for the two partners to meet; that had happened thrice. He nearly always acted with a power of attorney from his wife, not seeing the use of allowing her to know too much of his affairs.
He opened his pocketbook, and added:
“Here are the two hundred thousand francs’ worth of bills accepted by my wife; you must give her those in payment, and add one hundred thousand francs, which I will bring you tomorrow in the course of the morning…. I am ruining myself, my dear friend. This business will cost me a fortune.”
“But that,” observed the expropriation-agent, “will only make three hundred thousand francs…. Will the receipt be made out for that sum?”
“A receipt for three hundred thousand francs!” rejoined Saccard, laughing. “I should think so! We should be in a nice fix later on. According to our inventories, the property must now be estimated at two million five hundred thousand francs. The receipt will be for half that, of course.”
“Your wife will never sign it.”
“Yes, she will. I tell you it’s all right…. Why, I told her it was your first condition. You hold a pistol to our heads, don’t you see, with your bankruptcy? And it is in that matter that I pretended to doubt your honesty and accused you of wishing to cheat your creditors…. Do you think my wife understands a word of all that?”
Larsonneau shook his head and murmured:
“No matter, you ought to have thought of something simpler.”
“But my story is simplicity itself!” said Saccard, in great astonishment. “Where the devil do you find it complicated?”
He was quite unconscious of the incredible number of threads with which he interwove the most ordinary piece of business. He derived a real joy from the cock-and-bull story he had just told Renée; and what enraptured him was the impudence of the lie, the heaping up of impossibilities, the astonishing complication of the plot. He could have had the building-land long ago had he not worked out all this drama; but he would have found less enjoyment in obtaining it easily. He set to work, on the contrary, with the utmost naïveté to make a whole financial melodrama out of the Charonne speculation.
He rose, and taking Larsonneau’s arm, walked towards the drawingroom.
“You have quite understood me, have you not? Be content to follow my instructions, and later on you’ll applaud me…. I say, my dear fellow, you ought not to wear yellow gloves, they spoil the look of your hands.”
The expropriation-agent only smiled and murmured:
“Oh, gloves have their advantages, my dear master: you can touch anything without being defiled.”
As they entered the drawingroom, Saccard was surprised and somewhat alarmed to find Maxime on the other side of the hangings. The young man was seated on a couch
