This rash speech, in which the words "my own son" came out as full as
a river in flood, was, by the end of the hour, ratified as a formal
promise to settle twelve hundred francs a year on the future boy. And
this promise became, on Valerie's tongue and in her countenance, what
a drum is in the hands of a child; for three weeks she played on it
incessantly.
At the moment when Baron Hulot was leaving the Rue Vanneau, as happy
as a man who after a year of married life still desires an heir,
Madame Olivier had yielded to Hortense, and given up the note she was
instructed to give only into the Count's own hands. The young wife
paid twenty francs for that letter. The wretch who commits suicide
must pay for the opium, the pistol, the charcoal.
Hortense read and re-read the note; she saw nothing but this sheet of
white paper streaked with black lines; the universe held for her
nothing but that paper; everything was dark around her. The glare of
the conflagration that was consuming the edifice of her happiness
lighted up the page, for blackest night enfolded her. The shouts of
her little Wenceslas at play fell on her ear, as if he had been in the
depths of a valley and she on a high mountain.
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