“Josepha!—­it is I——­”

The singer recognized her Hulot only by his voice.

“What? you, poor old man?—­On my honor, you look like a twenty-franc piece that the Jews have sweated and the money-changers refuse.”

“Alas, yes,” replied Hulot; “I am snatched from the jaws of death!  But you are as lovely as ever.  Will you be kind?”

“That depends,” said she; “everything is relative.”

“Listen,” said Hulot; “can you put me up for a few days in a servant’s room under the roof?  I have nothing—­not a farthing, not a hope; no food, no pension, no wife, no children, no roof over my head; without honor, without courage, without a friend; and worse than all that, liable to imprisonment for not meeting a bill.”

“Poor old fellow! you are without most things.—­Are you also sans culotte?”

“You laugh at me!  I am done for,” cried the Baron.  “And I counted on you as Gourville did on Ninon.”

“And it was a ‘real lady,’ I am told who brought you to this,” said Josepha.  “Those precious sluts know how to pluck a goose even better than we do!—­Why, you are like a corpse that the crows have done with —­I can see daylight through!”

“Time is short, Josepha!”

“Come in, old boy, I am alone, as it happens, and my people don’t know you.  Send away your trap.  Is it paid for?”

“Yes,” said the Baron, getting out with the help of Josepha’s arm.

“You may call yourself my father if you like,” said the singer, moved to pity.

She made Hulot sit down in the splendid drawing-room where he had last seen her.

“And is it the fact, old man,” she went on, “that you have killed your brother and your uncle, ruined your family, mortgaged your children’s house over and over again, and robbed the Government till in Africa, all for your princess?”

Hulot sadly bent his head.

“Well, I admire that!” cried Josepha, starting up in her enthusiasm.  “It is a general flare-up!  It is Sardanapalus!  Splendid, thoroughly complete!  I may be a hussy, but I have a soul!  I tell you, I like a spendthrift, like you, crazy over a woman, a thousand times better than those torpid, heartless bankers, who are supposed to be so good, and who ruin no end of families with their rails—­gold for them, and iron for their gulls!  You have only ruined those who belong to you, you have sold no one but yourself; and then you have excuses, physical and moral.”

She struck a tragic attitude, and spouted: 

  “’Tis Venus whose grasp never parts from her prey.

And there you are!” and she pirouetted on her toe.

Vice, Hulot found, could forgive him; vice smiled on him from the midst of unbridled luxury.  Here, as before a jury, the magnitude of a crime was an extenuating circumstance.  “And is your lady pretty at any rate?” asked Josepha, trying as a preliminary act of charity, to divert Hulot’s thoughts, for his depression grieved her.