Honore de Balzac: Cousin Betty

1. PART I: THE PRODIGAL FATHER (continued)

Ten minutes later Madame Bijou was announced. Josepha very prudently placed the Baroness in the boudoir, and drew the curtain over the door.

"You would scare her," said she to Madame Hulot. "She would let nothing out if she suspected that you were interested in the information. Leave me to catechise her. Hide there, and you will hear everything. It is a scene that is played quite as often in real life as on the stage--"

"Well, Mother Bijou," she said to an old woman dressed in tartan stuff, and who looked like a porter's wife in her Sunday best, "so you are all very happy? Your daughter is in luck."

"Oh, happy? As for that!--My daughter gives us a hundred francs a month, while she rides in a carriage and eats off silver plate--she is a millionary, is my daughter! Olympe might have lifted me above labor. To have to work at my age? Is that being good to me?"

"She ought not to be ungrateful, for she owes her beauty to you," replied Josepha; "but why did she not come to see me? It was I who placed her in ease by settling her with my uncle."

"Yes, madame, with old Monsieur Thoul, but he is very old and broken--"

"But what have you done with him? Is he with you? She was very foolish to leave him; he is worth millions now."

"Heaven above us!" cried the mother. "What did I tell her when she behaved so badly to him, and he as mild as milk, poor old fellow? Oh! didn't she just give it him hot?--Olympe was perverted, madame?"

"But how?"