"Now you are an ass, Leroux. Damme, if you don't talk better sense when
you have a case, it's no wonder if you are unlucky. But you don't
understand."
He put a bold face on it with his companions, and his nature was not
sufficiently sensitive for him to suffer under slight; still, he was not
pleased with Nathalie's position. When she drove into the town, it was
simply, and without a vestige of parade, when M. Bourget considered
that a greater ceremony might have been observed. He would have liked
rattle and cracking of whips, with every one looking round, and asking,
"Who is that?" He questioned her closely, and found that she spent her
time in her own room, or with her husband, and he got no hint of her
sitting with her mother-in-law, or being admitted into pleasant
companionship. He could not comprehend it. That the De Beaudrillarts
should have no dealings with M. Bourget might be, and there was
something really pathetic in the way in which he effaced himself, and
kept away from Poissy when he was longing to be satisfied as to Fauvel's
work; but Nathalie was now a De Beaudrillart herself, and to humiliate
her was, in his eyes, to humiliate the family. He still talked bigly,
to be sure, to Leroux and his other companions, but in his heart there
was a vexed dissatisfaction which poisoned his triumph until the late
winter came. Then it broke out again, irrepressible and unbounded. For
on a cold February day, when snow lay thick in the Place de
l'Archeveche, and crumpled itself into the niches round the western
porches, where no statues have replaced those broken effigies which once
gazed down, M. Bourget was making his way sombrely back to his house,
when he became aware of a messenger from Poissy standing at the door.
The messenger brought good news--news which made M. Bourget come out
again radiant, and present him with a whole piece of twenty sous.
"That," he announced magnificently, so that the passers-by might
hear--"that is for you to drink the health of the young Baron de
Beaudrillart."