“No, no; it will be all for us,” he replied.

Then, as she continued to importune him with her questions, Pierre frowned, thinking that she wanted to wrest his secret from him.  “We’ve talked enough,” he said, abruptly.  “It’s late, let us go to sleep.  It will bring us bad luck to count our chickens beforehand.  I haven’t got the place yet.  Above all things, be prudent.”

When the lamp was extinguished, Felicite could not sleep.  With her eyes closed she built the most marvellous castles in the air.  Those twenty thousand francs a year danced a diabolical dance before her in the darkness.  She occupied splendid apartments in the new town, enjoyed the same luxuries as Monsieur Peirotte, gave parties, and bespattered the whole place with her wealth.  That, however, which tickled her vanity most was the high position that her husband would then occupy.  He would pay their state dividends to Granoux, Roudier, and all those people who now came to her house as they might come to a cafe, to swagger and learn the latest news.  She had noticed the free-and-easy manner in which these people entered her drawing-room, and it had made her take a dislike to them.  Even the marquis, with his ironical politeness, was beginning to displease her.  To triumph alone, therefore, to keep the cake for themselves, as she expressed it, was a revenge which she fondly cherished.  Later on, when all those ill-bred persons presented themselves, hats off, before Monsieur Rougon the receiver of taxes, she would crush them in her turn.  She was busy with these thoughts all night; and on the morrow, as she opened the shutters, she instinctively cast her first glance across the street towards Monsieur Peirotte’s house, and smiled as she contemplated the broad damask curtains hanging in the windows.

Felicite’s hopes, in becoming modified, had grown yet more intense.  Like all women, she did not object to a tinge of mystery.  The secret object that her husband was pursuing excited her far more than the Legitimist intrigues of Monsieur de Carnavant had ever done.  She abandoned, without much regret, the calculations she had based on the marquis’s success now that her husband declared he would be able to make large profits by other means.  She displayed, moreover, remarkable prudence and discretion.

In reality, she was still tortured by anxious curiosity; she studied Pierre’s slightest actions, endeavouring to discover their meaning.  What if by chance he were following the wrong track?  What if Eugene were dragging them in his train into some break-neck pit, whence they would emerge yet more hungry and impoverished?  However, faith was dawning on her.  Eugene had commanded with such an air of authority that she ultimately came to believe in him.  In this case again some unknown power was at work.  Pierre would speak mysteriously of the high personages whom their eldest son visited in Paris.  For her part she did not know what he could have to do with