Felicite leant over him and drank in his words. She made
him repeat certain parts of his story, declaring she had not heard; in
fact, her delight bewildered her so much that at times she seemed quite
deaf. When Pierre related the events at the Town Hall, she burst into a
fit of laughter, changed her chair three times, and moved the furniture
about, quite unable to sit still. After forty years of continuous
struggle, fortune had at last yielded to them. Eventually she became so
mad over it that she forgot all prudence.
"It's to me you owe all this!" she exclaimed, in an outburst of triumph.
"If I hadn't looked after you, you would have been nicely taken in by
the insurgents. You booby, it was Garconnet, Sicardot, and the others,
that had got to be thrown to those wild beasts."
Then, showing her teeth, loosened by age, she added, with a girlish
smile: "Well, the Republic for ever! It has made our path clear."
But Pierre had turned cross. "That's just like you!" he muttered; "you
always fancy that you've foreseen everything. It was I who had the idea
of hiding myself. As though women understood anything about politics!
Bah, my poor girl, if you were to steer the bark we should very soon be
shipwrecked."
Felicite bit her lip. She had gone too far and forgotten her
self-assigned part of good, silent fairy. Then she was seized with one
of those fits of covert exasperation, which she generally experienced
when her husband tried to crush her with his superiority.
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