Montes had heard
everything.
"Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame
Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears.
It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is
so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of
every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so
low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve.
"But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?"
asked the Brazilian.
This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the
life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it
had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist.
"Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once
by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we
are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of
America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That
husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a
head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being
ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty
--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now
abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful
official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who
is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of
trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when
Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----"
"How much more will your husband get then?"
"A thousand crowns.
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