"Monsieur," she said, interrupting him with ineffable impertinence,
"wouldn't you have given me money if I had asked for it?"

Recalled to a sense of gallantry, du Bousquier had a remembrance of
past happiness and grunted his assent. Suzanne took the bag and
departed, after allowing the old bachelor to kiss her, which he did
with an air that seemed to say, "It is a right which costs me dear;
but it is better than being harried by a lawyer in the court of
assizes as the seducer of a girl accused of infanticide."

Suzanne hid the sack in a sort of gamebag made of osier which she had
on her arm, all the while cursing du Bousquier for his stinginess; for
one thousand francs was the sum she wanted. Once tempted of the devil
to desire that sum, a girl will go far when she has set foot on the
path of trickery. As she made her way along the rue du Bercail, it
came into her head that the Maternity Society, presided over by
Mademoiselle Cormon, might be induced to complete the sum at which she
had reckoned her journey to Paris, which to a grisette of Alencon
seemed considerable. Besides, she hated du Bousquier. The latter had
evidently feared a revelation of his supposed misconduct to Madame
Granson; and Suzanne, at the risk of not getting a penny from the
society, was possessed with the desire, on leaving Alencon, of
entangling the old bachelor in the inextricable meshes of a provincial
slander. In all grisettes there is something of the malevolent
mischief of a monkey. Accordingly, Suzanne now went to see Madame
Granson, composing her face to an expression of the deepest dejection.



CHAPTER III