"How, Madame Denis!" said D'Harmental, "and you left me in ignorance that I had the honor to succeed in my room to the heir apparent of your family? I am no longer astonished to find my room so gayly fitted up; I recognize the cares of a mother."
"Yes, much good may it do you; but I have one bit of advice to give you. Don't look out of window too much."
"Why? because you have a certain neighbor opposite you."
"Mademoiselle Bathilde," said the chevalier, carried away by his first impulse.
"Ah! you know that already?" answered Boniface; "good, good, good; that will do."----"Will you be quiet, monsieur!" cried Madame Denis.
"Listen!" answered Boniface; "one must inform one's lodgers when one has prohibited things about one's house. You are not in a lawyer's office; you do not know that."
"The child is full of wit," said the Abbe Brigaud in that bantering tone, thanks to which it was impossible to know whether he was serious or not.
"But," answered Madame Denis, "what would you have in common between Monsieur Raoul and Bathilde?"
"What in common? Why, in a week, he will be madly in love with her, and it is not worth loving a coquette."
"Yes, a coquette, a coquette," said Boniface; "I have said it, and I do not draw back. A coquette, who flirts with the young men and lives with an old one, without counting that little brute of a Mirza, who eats up all my bon-bons, and now bites me every time she meets me."
"Leave the room, mesdemoiselles," cried Madame Denis, rising and making her daughters rise also. "Leave the room. Ears so pure as yours ought not to hear such things."
And she pushed Mademoiselle Athenais and Mademoiselle Emilie toward the door of their room, where she entered with them.
As to D'Harmental, he felt a violent desire to break Boniface's head with a wine-bottle. Nevertheless, seeing the absurdity of the situation, he made an effort and restrained himself.
"But," said he, "I thought that the bourgeois whom I saw on the terrace--for no doubt it is of him that you speak, Monsieur Boniface--"
"Of himself, the old rascal; what did you think of him?"
"Her father! not quite. Mademoiselle Bathilde has no father."
"Her uncle after the Bretagne fashion, but in no other manner."