“Hector, you are a father!” she said in his ear.  “That is what comes of quarreling and making friends again——­”

Perceiving a look of surprise, which the Baron did not at once conceal, Valerie assumed a reserve which brought the old man to despair.  She made him wring the proofs from her one by one.  When conviction, led on by vanity, had at last entered his mind, she enlarged on Monsieur Marneffe’s wrath.

“My dear old veteran,” said she, “you can hardly avoid getting your responsible editor, our representative partner if you like, appointed head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor, for you really have done for the poor man, he adores his Stanislas, the little monstrosity who is so like him, that to me he is insufferable.  Unless you prefer to settle twelve hundred francs a year on Stanislas—­the capital to be his, and the life-interest payable to me, of course—­”

“But if I am to settle securities, I would rather it should be on my own son, and not on the monstrosity,” said the Baron.

This rash speech, in which the words “my own son” came out as full as a river in flood, was, by the end of the hour, ratified as a formal promise to settle twelve hundred francs a year on the future boy.  And this promise became, on Valerie’s tongue and in her countenance, what a drum is in the hands of a child; for three weeks she played on it incessantly.

At the moment when Baron Hulot was leaving the Rue Vanneau, as happy as a man who after a year of married life still desires an heir, Madame Olivier had yielded to Hortense, and given up the note she was instructed to give only into the Count’s own hands.  The young wife paid twenty francs for that letter.  The wretch who commits suicide must pay for the opium, the pistol, the charcoal.

Hortense read and re-read the note; she saw nothing but this sheet of white paper streaked with black lines; the universe held for her nothing but that paper; everything was dark around her.  The glare of the conflagration that was consuming the edifice of her happiness lighted up the page, for blackest night enfolded her.  The shouts of her little Wenceslas at play fell on her ear, as if he had been in the depths of a valley and she on a high mountain.  Thus insulted at four-and-twenty, in all the splendor of her beauty, enhanced by pure and devoted love—­it was not a stab, it was death.  The first shock had been merely on the nerves, the physical frame had struggled in the grip of jealousy; but now certainty had seized her soul, her body was unconscious.

For about ten minutes Hortense sat under the incubus of this oppression.  Then a vision of her mother appeared before her, and revulsion ensued; she was calm and cool, and mistress of her reason.

She rang.

“Get Louise to help you, child,” said she to the cook.  “As quickly as you can, pack up everything that belongs to me and everything wanted for the little boy.  I give you an hour.  When all is ready, fetch a hackney coach from the stand, and call me.