There were--"
"Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired.
"Worthy Madame Florent--"
"You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?"
"Yes, at their house; I made a mistake."
"You did not take a coach to come home?"
"No."
"And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?"
"Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as
the Madeleine, talking all the way."
"It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the
Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at
her husband's patent leather boots.
It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue
Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled.
"Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to
lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination.
He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for
Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth
of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman
and his workmen.
"Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am
going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to
get up early, by your leave, my pet.
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