“Oh yes,” said Crevel, “your little house will cost as much as that.”

“Then you have four hundred thousand francs?” said she thoughtfully.

“No.”

“Then, sir, you meant to lend that old horror the two hundred thousand francs due for my hotel?  What a crime, what high treason!”

“Only listen to me.”

“If you were giving the money to some idiotic philanthropic scheme, you would be regarded as a coming man,” she went on, with increasing eagerness, “and I should be the first to advise it; for you are too simple to write a big political book that might make you famous; as for style, you have not enough to butter a pamphlet; but you might do as other men do who are in your predicament, and who get a halo of glory about their name by putting it at the top of some social, or moral, or general, or national enterprise.  Benevolence is out of date, quite vulgar.  Providing for old offenders, and making them more comfortable than the poor devils who are honest, is played out.  What I should like to see is some invention of your own with an endowment of two hundred thousand francs—­something difficult and really useful.  Then you would be talked about as a man of mark, a Montyon, and I should be very proud of you!

“But as to throwing two hundred thousand francs into a holy-water shell, or lending them to a bigot—­cast off by her husband, and who knows why? there is always some reason:  does any one cast me off, I ask you?—­is a piece of idiocy which in our days could only come into the head of a retired perfumer.  It reeks of the counter.  You would not dare look at yourself in the glass two days after.

“Go and pay the money in where it will be safe—­run, fly; I will not admit you again without the receipt in your hand.  Go, as fast and soon as you can!”

She pushed Crevel out of the room by the shoulders, seeing avarice blossoming in his face once more.  When she heard the outer door shut, she exclaimed: 

“Then Lisbeth is revenged over and over again!  What a pity that she is at her old Marshal’s now!  We would have had a good laugh!  So that old woman wants to take the bread out of my mouth.  I will startle her a little!”

Marshal Hulot, being obliged to live in a style suited to the highest military rank, had taken a handsome house in the Rue du Mont-Parnasse, where there are three or four princely residences.  Though he rented the whole house, he inhabited only the ground floor.  When Lisbeth went to keep house for him, she at once wished to let the first floor, which, as she said, would pay the whole rent, so that the Count would live almost rent-free; but the old soldier would not hear of it.