, your noble father said to me,
'With Valerie as my wife, I can become a peer of France! I shall buy an
estate I have my eye on--Presles, which Madame de Serizy wants to
sell. I shall be Crevel de Presles, member of the Common Council of
Seine-et-Oise, and Deputy. I shall have a son! I shall be everything
I have ever wished to be.'--'Heh!' said I, 'and what about your
daughter?'--'Bah!' says he, 'she is only a woman! And she is quite too
much of a Hulot. Valerie has a horror of them all.--My son-in-law has
never chosen to come to this house; why has he given himself such airs
as a Mentor, a Spartan, a Puritan, a philanthropist? Besides, I have
squared accounts with my daughter; she has had all her mother's fortune,
and two hundred thousand francs to that. So I am free to act as I
please.--I shall judge of my son-in-law and Celestine by their conduct
on my marriage; as they behave, so shall I. If they are nice to their
stepmother, I will receive them. I am a man, after all!'--In short, all
this rhodomontade! And an attitude like Napoleon on the column."

The ten months' widowhood insisted on by the law had now elapsed some
few days since. The estate of Presles was purchased. Victorin and
Celestine had that very morning sent Lisbeth to make inquiries as to the
marriage of the fascinating widow to the Mayor of Paris, now a member of
the Common Council of the Department of Seine-et-Oise.

Celestine and Hortense, in whom the ties of affection had been
drawn closer since they had lived under the same roof, were almost
inseparable. The Baroness, carried away by a sense of honesty which led
her to exaggerate the duties of her place, devoted herself to the work
of charity of which she was the agent; she was out almost every day
from eleven till five. The sisters-in-law, united in their cares for
the children whom they kept together, sat at home and worked. They had
arrived at the intimacy which thinks aloud, and were a touching picture
of two sisters, one cheerful and the other sad. The less happy of the
two, handsome, lively, high-spirited, and clever, seemed by her manner
to defy her painful situation; while the melancholy Celestine, sweet and
calm, and as equable as reason itself, might have been supposed to have
some secret grief. It was this contradiction, perhaps, that added to
their warm friendship. Each supplied the other with what she lacked.

Seated in a little summer-house in the garden, which the speculator's
trowe