69. A second father for the Marneffe child

Ten minutes after the dispatch of this fatal letter, Baron Hulot arrived. Madame Marneffe flung her arms round the old man’s neck with kittenish grace.

‘Hector, you’re a father!’ she whispered to him. ‘That’s what comes of quarrelling and making up again.’

Seeing a certain look of surprise which the Baron did not conceal quickly enough, Valérie assumed a cold expression which drove the Councillor of State to despair. She made him extract the most convincing proofs from her one by one. When conviction, gently led on by vanity, had made its way into the old man’s mind, she told him of Monsieur Marneffe’s fury.

‘My dear old grumbler,’ she said, ‘it will be very difficult for you not to appoint the publisher who takes responsibility for your work, our manager if you like, an office manager and an Officer of the Legion of Honour, for you’ve ruined the man. He adores his Stanislas, a little monstrico who takes after him but whom I can’t abide. Unless you would rather give Stanislas an annuity of twelve hundred francs, the capital to be his, of course, but the interest in my name.’

‘But if I provide an annuity, I prefer it to be in my son’s name, and not in the monstrico’s’, said the Baron.

This unwise remark, from which the words my son burst forth like an overflowing river, was transformed after an hour’s conversation into a formal promise to settle twelve hundred francs a year on the child to come.

This promise, on Valérie’s tongue and in the expression of her face, then became like a drum in a little boy’s hands and she was to play on it for three weeks.