"But I myself was married with only twenty thousand francs for my
portion--"
"In 1819, cousin. And it was _you_, a woman with a head on your
shoulders, and the royal protection of Louis XVIII."
"Be still, my child is a perfect angel. She is clever, she has a warm
heart, she will have a hundred thousand francs on her wedding day, to
say nothing of the most brilliant expectations; and yet she stays on
our hands," and so on and so on. For twenty minutes, Mme. de Marville
talked on about herself and her Cecile, pitying herself after the
manner of mothers in bondage to marriageable daughters.
Pons had dined at the house every week for twenty years, and Camusot
de Marville was the only cousin he had in the world; but he had yet to
hear the first word spoken as to his own affairs--nobody cared to know
how he lived. Here and elsewhere the poor cousin was a kind of sink
down which his relatives poured domestic confidences. His discretion
was well known; indeed, was he not bound over to silence when a single
imprudent word would have shut the door of ten houses upon him? And he
must combine his role of listener with a second part; he must applaud
continually, smile on every one, accuse nobody, defend nobody; from
his point of view, every one must be in the right. And so, in the
house of his kinsman, Pons no longer counted as a man; he was a
digestive apparatus.
In the course of a long tirade, Mme. Camusot de Marville avowed with
due circumspection that she was prepared to take almost any son-in-law
with her eyes shut.
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