Monsieur le Baron is no longer where I lodged him."

Ten minutes later Madame Bijou was announced. Josepha very prudently
placed the Baroness in the boudoir, and drew the curtain over the
door.

"You would scare her," said she to Madame Hulot. "She would let
nothing out if she suspected that you were interested in the
information. Leave me to catechise her. Hide there, and you will hear
everything. It is a scene that is played quite as often in real life
as on the stage--"

"Well, Mother Bijou," she said to an old woman dressed in tartan
stuff, and who looked like a porter's wife in her Sunday best, "so you
are all very happy? Your daughter is in luck."

"Oh, happy? As for that!--My daughter gives us a hundred francs a
month, while she rides in a carriage and eats off silver plate--she is
a millionary, is my daughter! Olympe might have lifted me above labor.
To have to work at my age? Is that being good to me?"

"She ought not to be ungrateful, for she owes her beauty to you,"
replied Josepha; "but why did she not come to see me? It was I who
placed her in ease by settling her with my uncle."

"Yes, madame, with old Monsieur Thoul, but he is very old and
broken--"

"But what have you done with him? Is he with you? She was very foolish
to leave him; he is worth millions now."

"Heaven above us!" cried the mother. "What did I tell her when she
behaved so badly to him, and he as mild as milk, poor old fellow? Oh!
didn't she just give it him hot?--Olympe was perverted, madame?"

"But how?"

"She got to know a _claqueur_, madame, saving your presence, a man
paid to clap, you know, the grand nephew of an old mattress-picker of
the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. This good-for-naught, as all your
good-looking fellows are, paid to make a piece go, is the cock of the
walk out on the Boulevard du Temple, where he works up the new plays,
and takes care that the actresses get a reception, as he calls it.
First, he has a good breakfast in the morning; then, before the play,
he dines, to be 'up to the mark,' as he says; in short, he is a born
lover of billiards and drams. 'But that is not following a trade,' as
I said to Olympe."

"It is a trade men follow, unfortunately," said Josepha.

"Well, the rascal turned Olympe's head, and he, madame, did not keep
good company--when I tell you he was very near being nabbed by the
police in a tavern where thieves meet. 'Wever, Monsieur Braulard, the
leader of the claque, got him out of