“Here is Lisbeth!” said Hortense.  “Well, cousin, and how is the Inferno of the Rue Barbet going on?”

“Badly for you, my children.—­Your husband, my dear Hortense, is more crazy about that woman than ever, and she, I must own, is madly in love with him.—­Your father, dear Celestine, is gloriously blind.  That, to be sure, is nothing; I have had occasion to see it once a fortnight; really, I am lucky never to have had anything to do with men, they are besotted creatures.—­Five days hence you, dear child, and Victorin will have lost your father’s fortune.”

“Then the banns are cried?” said Celestine.

“Yes,” said Lisbeth, “and I have just been arguing your case.  I pointed out to that monster, who is going the way of the other, that if he would only get you out of the difficulties you are in by paying off the mortgage on the house, you would show your gratitude and receive your stepmother—­”

Hortense started in horror.

“Victorin will see about that,” said Celestine coldly.

“But do you know what Monsieur le Maire’s answer was?” said Lisbeth.  “’I mean to leave them where they are.  Horses can only be broken in by lack of food, sleep, and sugar.’—­Why, Baron Hulot was not so bad as Monsieur Crevel.

“So, my poor dears, you may say good-bye to the money.  And such a fine fortune!  Your father paid three million francs for the Presles estate, and he has thirty thousand francs a year in stocks!  Oh!—­he has no secrets from me.  He talks of buying the Hotel de Navarreins, in the Rue du Bac.  Madame Marneffe herself has forty thousand francs a year.  —­Ah!—­here is our guardian angel, here comes your mother!” she exclaimed, hearing the rumble of wheels.

And presently the Baroness came down the garden steps and joined the party.  At fifty-five, though crushed by so many troubles, and constantly trembling as if shivering with ague, Adeline, whose face was indeed pale and wrinkled, still had a fine figure, a noble outline, and natural dignity.  Those who saw her said, “She must have been beautiful!” Worn with the grief of not knowing her husband’s fate, of being unable to share with him this oasis in the heart of Paris, this peace and seclusion and the better fortune that was dawning on the family, her beauty was the beauty of a ruin.  As each gleam of hope died out, each day of search proved vain, Adeline sank into fits of deep melancholy that drove her children to despair.

The Baroness had gone out that morning with fresh hopes, and was anxiously expected.  An official, who was under obligations to Hulot, to whom he owed his position and advancement, declared that he had seen the Baron in a box at the Ambigu-Comique theatre with a woman of extraordinary beauty.  So Adeline had gone to call on the Baron Verneuil.  This important personage, while asserting that he had positively seen his old patron, and that his behaviour to the woman indicated an illicit establishment, told Madame Hulot that to avoid meeting him the Baron had left long before the end of the play.