Then Monsieur le
Maire had considered his connection with Mademoiselle Heloise
Brisetout as quite incompatible with his political position.
Indeed, long before his accession to the civic chair of the Mayoralty,
his gallant intimacies had been wrapped in the deepest mystery. But,
as the reader may have guessed, Crevel had soon purchased the right of
taking his revenge, as often as circumstances allowed, for having been
bereft of Josepha, at the cost of a bond bearing six thousand francs
of interest in the name of Valerie Fortin, wife of Sieur Marneffe, for
her sole and separate use. Valerie, inheriting perhaps from her mother
the special acumen of the kept woman, read the character of her
grotesque adorer at a glance. The phrase "I never had a lady for a
mistress," spoken by Crevel to Lisbeth, and repeated by Lisbeth to her
dear Valerie, had been handsomely discounted in the bargain by which
she got her six thousand francs a year in five per cents. And since
then she had never allowed her prestige to grow less in the eyes of
Cesar Birotteau's erewhile bagman.
Crevel himself had married for money the daughter of a miller of la
Brie, an only child indeed, whose inheritance constituted
three-quarters of his fortune; for when retail-dealers grow rich, it
is generally not so much by trade as through some alliance between
the shop and rural thrift. A large proportion of the farmers,
corn-factors, dairy-keepers, and market-gardeners in the neighborhood
of Paris, dream of the glories of the desk for their daughters, and
look upon a shopkeeper, a jeweler, or a money-changer as a son-in-law
after their own heart, in preference to a notary or an attorney, whose
superior social position is a ground of suspicion; they are afraid of
being scorned in the future by these citizen bigwigs.
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