about
him,--all these things struck the beholder with the same sense of
surprise as storm-clouds in a blue sky. If in his private office, as
he showed himself to La Cibot, he was the common knife that a murderer
catches up for his crime,--now, at the Presidente's door, he was the
daintily-wrought dagger which a woman sets among the ornaments on her
what-not.

A great change had taken place in the Rue de Hanovre. The Count and
Countess Popinot and the young people would not allow the President and
his wife to leave the house that they had settled upon their daughter to
pay rent elsewhere. M. and Mme. la Presidente, therefore, were installed
on the second floor, now left at liberty, for the elderly lady had made
up her mind to end her days in the country.

Mme. Camusot took Madeleine Vivet, with her cook and her man-servant,
to the second floor, and would have been as much pinched for money as in
the early days, if the house had not been rent free, and the President's
salary increased to ten thousand francs. This _aurea mediocritas_ was
but little satisfactory to Mme. de Marville. Even now she wished for
means more in accordance with her ambitions; for when she handed over
their fortune to their daughter, she spoiled her husband's prospects.
Now Amelie had set her heart upon seeing her husband in the Chamber of
Deputies; she was not one of those women who find it easy to give up
their way; and she by no means despaired of returning her husband for
the arrondissement in which Marville is situated. So for the past two
months she had teased her father-in-law, M. le Baron Camusot (for the
new peer of France had been advanced to that rank), and done her utmost
to extort an advance of a hundred thousand francs of the inheritance
which one day would be theirs. She wanted, she said, to buy a small
estate worth about two thousand francs per annum set like a wedge
within the Marville lands. There she and her husband would be near their
children and in their own house, while the addition would round out the
Marville property. With that the Presidente laid stress upon the recent
sacrifices which she and her husband had been compelled to make in order
to marry Cecile to Viscount Popinot, and asked the old man how he could
bar his eldest son's way to the highest honors of the magistracy, when
such honors were only to be had by those who made themselves a strong
position in parliament. Her husband would know how to take up such a
posi