hundred
thousand francs--something difficult and really useful. Then you would
be talked about as a man of mark, a Montyon, and I should be very proud
of you!

"But as to throwing two hundred thousand francs into a holy-water shell,
or lending them to a bigot--cast off by her husband, and who knows why?
there is always some reason: does any one cast me off, I ask you?--is
a piece of idiocy which in our days could only come into the head of a
retired perfumer. It reeks of the counter. You would not dare look at
yourself in the glass two days after.

"Go and pay the money in where it will be safe--run, fly; I will not
admit you again without the receipt in your hand. Go, as fast and soon
as you can!"

She pushed Crevel out of the room by the shoulders, seeing avarice
blossoming in his face once more. When she heard the outer door shut,
she exclaimed:

"Then Lisbeth is revenged over and over again! What a pity that she is
at her old Marshal's now! We would have had a good laugh! So that old
woman wants to take the bread out of my mouth. I will startle her a
little!"

Marshal Hulot, being obliged to live in a style suited to the highest
military rank, had taken a handsome house in the Rue du Mont-Parnasse,
where there are three or four princely residences. Though he rented the
whole house, he inhabited only the ground floor. When Lisbeth went to
keep house for him, she at once wished to let the first floor, which, as
she said, would pay the whole rent, so that the Count would live almost
rent-free; but the old soldier would not hear of it.

For some months past the Marshal had had many sad thoughts. He had
guessed how miserably poor his sister-in-law was, and suspected her
griefs without understanding their cause. The old man, so cheerful in
his deafness, became taciturn; he could not help thinking that his house
would one day be a refuge for the Baroness and her daughter; and it was
for them that he kept the first floor. The smallness of his fortune
was so well known at headquarters, that the War Minister, the Prince
de Wissembourg, begged his old comrade to accept a sum of money for his
household expenses. This sum the Marshal spent in furnishing the ground
floor, which was in every way suitable; for, as he said, he would not
accept the Marshal's baton to walk the streets with.

The house had belonged to a senator under the Empire, and the ground
floor drawing-rooms had been very magnificently fitted with car