The Lorraine peasant thought she ought to go into Crevel’s room, where she found Victorin and his wife sitting three paces away from the diseased man’s bed.
‘Lisbeth,’ he said, ‘they’re concealing my wife’s condition from me. You’ve just seen her. How is she?’
‘She’s better; she says she’s saved,’ replied Lisbeth, permitting herself this ambiguity in order to set Crevel’s mind at rest.
‘Oh good,’ continued the Mayor, ‘for I was afraid I was the cause of her illness. There are risks in being a commercial traveller in perfumery. I’ve been reproaching myself. If I were to lose her, what would become of me? On my word of honour, children, I adore that woman.’
Crevel sat up in bed and tried to strike his attitude.
‘Oh, Papa,’ said Célestine, ‘if you could be well again, I’d receive my stepmother. I promise you.’
‘Poor little Célestine,’ said Crevel, ‘come and kiss me.’
Victorin restrained his wife, who was springing forward.
‘Perhaps you’re unaware, Monsieur, that your illness is infectious,’ said the lawyer gently.
‘That’s so,’ replied Crevel. ‘The doctors are congratulating themselves on having found in me some kind of medieval plague they thought was lost; they’re making a big song and dance about it in their Faculties. It’s very funny.’
‘Papa,’ said Célestine, ‘be brave and you’ll get over this illness.’
‘Don’t worry, children. Death looks twice before striking a Mayor of Paris!’ he said with ludicrous composure. ‘And then, if my district is so unfortunate as to lose the man whom it has twice honoured with its votes (there—you see how fluently I express myself!), well, I’ll know how to pack my bags. I’m a former commercial traveller; I’m used to departures. You see, children, I’m a freethinker.’
‘Papa, promise me to let a priest come to your bedside.’
‘Never,’ replied Crevel. ‘What do you expect? I’ve sucked the milk of the Revolution. I haven’t Baron d’Hol-bach’s * intellect but I have his strength of mind. I’m more than ever a Regency * type, a grey Musketeer, * an Abbé Dubois,* a Maréchal de Richelieu!* Damn it all! My poor wife, who’s going out of her mind, has just sent me a fellow in a cassock, to me, an admirer of Béranger,* the friend of Lisette,* the child of Voltaire and Rousseau! The doctor said to me, to try me out, to find out if the disease was getting me down, “Have you seen Monsieur l’Abbé?” Well, I imitated the great Montesquieu.* Yes, I looked at the door, see, like this,’ he said, turning three quarters round as in his portrait, and stretching out his hand authoritatively, ‘and I said:
… That slave, he came.
His order showed, but nothing gained.*
His order is a nice pun which proves that in his last moments Monsieur le Président de Montesquieu retained all his charming wit, for they’d sent him a Jesuit! I like that passage … one can’t say of his life, but of his death. Oh, the passage! Another pun! The Passage Montesquieu.’ *
Victorin Hulot gazed sadly at his father-in-law, wondering if folly and vanity did not have a power as strong as that of true greatness of soul. The causes which activate the springs of the soul often bear no relation to the results. Can it be that the strength of character of a great criminal is of the same nature as that with which Champcenetz * proudly went to the guillotine?
At the end of the week, after terrible suffering, Madame Crevel was buried, and two days later Crevel followed his wife. Thus the provisions of the marriage contract were annulled and Crevel inherited from Valérie.
The day after the funeral, the lawyer saw the old monk again and received him in silence. The monk held out his hand without a word, and, also without a word, Maître Victorin Hulot gave him eighty thousand-franc notes, taken from the money found in Crevel’s desk.
The younger Madame Hulot inherited the Presles estate and an income of thirty thousand francs a year. Madame Crevel had left three hundred thousand francs to Baron Hulot. On his majority, the scrofulous Stanislas was to have Crevel’s house and twenty-four thousand francs a year.