"You great pumpkin!" she exclaimed, with an infernal peal of laughter.
"That is how your pious women go about it to drag from you a plum of two
hundred thousand francs. And you, who talk of the Marechal de Richelieu,
the prototype of Lovelace, you could be taken in by such a stale trick
as that! I could get hundreds of thousands of francs out of you any day,
if I chose, you old ninny!--Keep your money! If you have more than
you know what to do with, it is mine. If you give two sous to that
'respectable' woman, who is pious forsooth, because she is fifty-six
years of age, we shall never meet again, and you may take her for your
mistress! You could come back to me next day bruised all over from
her bony caresses and sodden with her tears, and sick of her little
barmaid's caps and her whimpering, which must turn her favors into
showers--"

"In point of fact," said Crevel, "two hundred thousand francs is a round
sum of money."

"They have fine appetites, have the goody sort! By the poker! they
sell their sermons dearer than we sell the rarest and realest thing on
earth--pleasure.--And they can spin a yarn! There, I know them. I have
seen plenty in my mother's house. They think everything is allowable
for the Church and for--Really, my dear love, you ought to be ashamed
of yourself--for you are not so open-handed! You have not given me two
hundred thousand francs all told!"

"Oh yes," said Crevel, "your little house will cost as much as that."

"Then you have four hundred thousand francs?" said she thoughtfully.

"No."

"Then, sir, you meant to lend that old horror the two hundred thousand
francs due for my hotel? What a crime, what high treason!"

"Only listen to me."

"If you were giving the money to some idiotic philanthropic scheme,
you would be regarded as a coming man," she went on, with increasing
eagerness, "and I should be the first to advise it; for you are too
simple to write a big political book that might make you famous; as for
style, you have not enough to butter a pamphlet; but you might do as
other men do who are in your predicament, and who get a halo of glory
about their name by putting it at the top of some social, or moral,
or general, or national enterprise. Benevolence is out of date, quite
vulgar. Providing for old offenders, and making them more comfortable
than the poor devils who are honest, is played out. What I should like
to see is some invention of your own with an endowment of two