At last she left the window, and walked slowly round the drawing-room.
It was there that, a little while previously, everybody had held out
their hands to her husband and herself. He and she had conquered; the
citizens were at their feet. The yellow drawing-room seemed to her a
holy place. The dilapidated furniture, the frayed velvet, the chandelier
soiled with fly-marks, all those poor wrecks now seemed to her like
the glorious bullet-riddled debris of a battle-field. The plain of
Austerlitz would not have stirred her to deeper emotion.
When she returned to the window, she perceived Aristide wandering about
the place of the Sub-Prefecture, with his nose in the air. She beckoned
to him to come up, which he immediately did. It seemed as if he had only
been waiting for this invitation.
"Come in," his mother said to him on the landing, seeing that he
hesitated. "Your father is not here."
Aristide evinced all the shyness of a prodigal son returning home. He
had not been inside the yellow drawing-room for nearly four years. He
still carried his arm in a sling.
"Does your hand still pain you?" his mother asked him, ironically.
He blushed as he answered with some embarrassment: "Oh! it's getting
better; it's nearly well again now."
Then he lingered there, loitering about and not knowing what to say.
Felicite came to the rescue. "I suppose you've heard them talking about
your father's noble conduct?" she resumed.
He replied that the whole town was talking of it.
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