Honore de Balzac: Cousin Betty

1. PART I: THE PRODIGAL FATHER (continued)

"You have my full permission to go and tell your history to Monsieur Crevel; he will never believe you. I have a perfect right to marry him, and he becomes my husband the day after to-morrow.--I shall make him very happy.--Good-bye; try to forget me."

"Oh! Valerie," cried Henri Montes, clasping her in his arms, "that is impossible!--Come to Brazil!"

Valerie looked in his face, and saw him her slave.

"Well, if you still love me, Henri, two years hence I will be your wife; but your expression at this moment strikes me as very suspicious."

"I swear to you that they made me drink, that false friends threw this girl on my hands, and that the whole thing is the outcome of chance!" said Montes.

"Then I am to forgive you?" she asked, with a smile.

"But you will marry, all the same?" asked the Baron, in an agony of jealousy.

"Eighty thousand francs a year!" said she, with almost comical enthusiasm. "And Crevel loves me so much that he will die of it!"

"Ah! I understand," said Montes.

"Well, then, in a few days we will come to an understanding," said she.

And she departed triumphant.

"I have no scruples," thought the Baron, standing transfixed for a few minutes. "What! That woman believes she can make use of his passion to be quit of that dolt, as she counted on Marneffe's decease!--I shall be the instrument of divine wrath."

Two days later those of du Tillet's guests who had demolished Madame Marneffe tooth and nail, were seated round her table an hour after she has shed her skin and changed her name for the illustrious name of a Paris mayor. This verbal treason is one of the commonest forms of Parisian levity.