The old people received their daughter with an effusiveness that
touched her deeply. Her visit brought them some little change, and
that to them was worth a fortune. For the last four years they had
gone their way like navigators without a goal or a compass. Sitting by
the chimney corner, they would talk over their disasters under the old
law of _maximum_, of their great investments in cloth, of the way they
had weathered bankruptcies, and, above all, the famous failure of
Lecocq, Monsieur Guillaume's battle of Marengo. Then, when they had
exhausted the tale of lawsuits, they recapitulated the sum total of
their most profitable stock-takings, and told each other old stories
of the Saint-Denis quarter. At two o'clock old Guillaume went to cast
an eye on the business at the Cat and Racket; on his way back he
called at all the shops, formerly the rivals of his own, where the
young proprietors hoped to inveigle the old draper into some risky
discount, which, as was his wont, he never refused point-blank. Two
good Normandy horses were dying of their own fat in the stables of the
big house; Madame Guillaume never used them but to drag her on Sundays
to high Mass at the parish church. Three times a week the worthy
couple kept open house. By the influence of his son-in-law
Sommervieux, Monsieur Guillaume had been named a member of the
consulting board for the clothing of the Army. Since her husband had
stood so high in office, Madame Guillaume had decided that she must
receive; her rooms were so crammed with gold and silver ornaments, and
furniture, tasteless but of undoubted value, that the simplest room in
the house looked like a chapel.
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