During Madame's lifetime dinner was served to her and to her company by themselves.Neither Cochet nor Gaubertin, in spite of their great familiarity with the mistress, was ever admitted to her table; the leading lady of the Academie Royale retained, to her last hour, her sense of etiquette, her style of dress, her rouge and her heeled slippers, her carriage, her servants, and the majesty of her deportment.A divinity at the Opera, a divinity within her range of Parisian social life, she continued a divinity in the country solitudes, where her memory is still worshipped, and still holds its own against that of the old monarchy in the minds of the "best society" of Soulanges.
Soudry, who had paid his addresses to Mademoiselle Cochet from the time he first came into the neighborhood, owned the finest house in Soulanges, an income of six thousand francs, and the prospect of a retiring pension whenever he should quit the service.As soon as Cochet became Madame Soudry she was treated with great consideration in the town.Though she kept the strictest secrecy as to the amount of her savings,--which were intrusted, like those of Gaubertin, to the commissary of wine-merchants of the department in Paris, a certain Leclercq, a native of Soulanges, to whom Gaubertin supplied funds as sleeping partner in his business,--public opinion credited the former waiting-maid with one of the largest fortunes in the little town of twelve hundred inhabitants.
To the great astonishment of every one, Monsieur and Madame Soudry acknowledged as legitimate, in their marriage contract, a natural son of the gendarme, to whom, in future, Madame Soudry's fortune was to descend.At the time when this son was legally supplied with a mother, he had just ended his law studies in Paris and was about to enter into practice, with the intention of fitting himself for the magistracy.
It is scarcely necessary to remark that a mutual understanding of twenty years had produced the closest intimacy between the families of Gaubertin and Soudry.Both reciprocally declared themselves, to the end of their days, "urbi et orbi," to be the most upright and honorable persons in all France.Such community of interests, based on the mutual knowledge of the secret spots on the white garment of conscience, is one of the ties least recognized and hardest to untie in this low world.You who read this social drama, have you never felt a conviction as to two persons which has led you to say to yourself, in order to explain the continuance of a faithful devotion which made your own egotism blush, "They must surely have committed some crime together"?