"Then between two old daddies, such friends as--as we were, what more
natural than that we should think of our children marrying each other?
--Three months after his son had married my Celestine, Hulot--I don't
know how I can utter the wretch's name! he has cheated us both, madame
--well, the villain did me out of my little Josepha. The scoundrel
knew that he was supplanted in the heart of Jenny Cadine by a young
lawyer and by an artist--only two of them!--for the girl had more and
more of a howling success, and he stole my sweet little girl, a
perfect darling--but you must have seen her at the opera; he got her
an engagement there. Your husband is not so well behaved as I am. I am
ruled as straight as a sheet of music-paper. He had dropped a good
deal of money on Jenny Cadine, who must have cost him near on thirty
thousand francs a year. Well, I can only tell you that he is ruining
himself outright for Josepha.
"Josepha, madame, is a Jewess. Her name is Mirah, the anagram of
Hiram, an Israelite mark that stamps her, for she was a foundling
picked up in Germany, and the inquiries I have made prove that she is
the illegitimate child of a rich Jew banker. The life of the theatre,
and, above all, the teaching of Jenny Cadine, Madame Schontz, Malaga,
and Carabine, as to the way to treat an old man, have developed, in
the child whom I had kept in a respectable and not too expensive way
of life, all the native Hebrew instinct for gold and jewels--for the
golden calf.
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