Your son's
bosom feels as warm as toast. Long live the five-franc pieces! And they
pretend money cannot make a fellow happy. They lie; it is because they
do not know how to spend it."
Meantime at the chateau, as still befalls in emergencies and trials,
the master spirit came out and took its real place. Rose was now the
mistress of Beaurepaire; she set Jacintha, and Dard, and the doctor,
to pack up everything of value in the house. "Do it this moment!" she
cried; "once that notary gets possession of the house, it may be too
late. Enough of folly and helplessness. We have fooled away house and
lands; our movables shall not follow them."
The moment she had set the others to work, she wrote a single line to
Riviere to tell him the chateau and lands were sold, and would he come
to Beaurepaire at once? She ran with it herself to Bigot's auberge, the
nearest post-office, and then back to comfort her mother.
The baroness was seated in her arm-chair, moaning and wringing her
hands, and Rose was nursing and soothing her, and bathing her temples
with her last drop of eau de Cologne, and trying in vain to put some of
her own courage into her, when in came Josephine radiant with happiness,
crying "Joy! joy! joy!" and told her strange tale, with this difference,
that she related her own share in it briefly and coldly, and was more
eloquent than I about the strange soldier's goodness, and the interest
her mother had awakened in his heart.
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