At the words the _citoyenne_ Gamelin, whose lips were trembling, threw up her eyes to the ceiling and sighed out:
And, while she was lost in lamentations, looking like the holy women in a wayside calvary, a bad coal that had caught alight in the fire when her attention was diverted, began to fill the studio with a poisonous smother which, added to the stifling smell of quinces, was like to make the air unbreathable.
Élodie complained that her throat was tickling her and begged to have the window opened. But, directly the _citoyen_ Combalot had taken his leave and the _citoyenne_ Gamelin had gone back to her stove, Évariste repeated the same name in the girl's ear:
She looked up at him in some surprise, and very quietly, still going on cutting a quince in quarters:
She declared she did not understand and asked him to explain himself.
"That aristocrat! that _émigré_! that scoundrel!"
She shrugged her shoulders, and denied with the most natural air that she had never known a Jacques Maubel.
It was true; she _had_ never known anyone of the name.
She denied she had ever given red carnations to anybody but Évariste; but perhaps, on this point, her memory was not very good.
He had little experience of women and was far from having fully fathomed Élodie's character; still, he deemed her quite capable of cajoling and deceiving a cleverer man than himself.
Again she asseverated she had never known anybody called Maubel. And, having done peeling the quinces, she asked for a basin of water, because her fingers were sticky. This Gamelin brought her, and, as she washed her hands, she repeated her denials.
Again he repeated that he knew, and this time she made no reply.
She did not guess the object of her lover's question and she was a thousand miles from suspecting that this Maubel, whom she had never heard spoken of before, was to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal; she could make nothing of the suspicions with which she was assailed, but she knew them to be unfounded. For this reason, having very little hope of dissipating them, she had very little wish to do so either. She ceased to deny having known Maubel, preferring to leave her jealous lover to go astray on a false trail, when from one moment to the next, the smallest incident might start him on the right road. Her little lawyer's clerk of former days, now grown into a patriot dragoon and lady-killer, had quarrelled by now with his aristocratic mistress. Whenever he met Élodie in the street, he would gaze at her with a glance that seemed to say: