Оноре де Бальзак
The Lesser Bourgeoisie
CHAPTER XI. THE REIGN OF THEODOSE
From that day forth Thuillier became a dear, good friend. “My dear, good friend,” was the name given to him by Theodose, with voice inflections of varieties of tenderness which astonished Flavie. But “little aunt,” a name that flattered Brigitte deeply, was only given in family secrecy, and occasionally before Flavie. The activity of Theodose and Dutocq, Cerizet, Barbet, Metivier, Minard, Phellion, Colleville, and others of the Thuillier circle was extreme. Great and small, they all put their hands to the work. Cadenet procured thirty votes in his section. On the 30th of April Thuillier was proclaimed member of the Council-general of the department of the Seine by an imposing majority; in fact, he only needed sixty more votes to make his election unanimous. May 1st Thuillier joined the municipal body and went to the Tuileries to congratulate the King on his fete-day, and returned home radiant. He had gone where Minard went!
Ten days later a yellow poster announced the sale of the house, after due publication; the price named being seventy-five thousand francs; the final purchase to take place about the last of July. On this point Cerizet and Claparon had an agreement by which Cerizet pledged the sum of fifteen thousand francs (in words only, be it understood) to Claparon in case the latter could deceive the notary and keep him quiet until the time expired during which he might withdraw the property by bidding it in. Mademoiselle Thuillier, notified by Theodose, agreed entirely to this secret clause, understanding perfectly the necessity of paying the culprits guilty of the treachery. The money was to pass through la Peyrade’s hands. Claparon met his accomplice, the notary, on the Place de l’Observatoire by midnight. This young man, the successor of Leopold Hannequin, was one of those who run after fortune instead of following it leisurely. He now saw another future before him, and he managed his present affairs in order to be free to take hold of it. In this midnight interview, he offered Claparon ten thousand francs to secure himself in this dirty business, – a sum which was only to be paid on receipt, through Claparon, of a counter-deed from the nominal purchaser of the property. The notary was aware that that sum was all-important to Claparon to extricate him from present difficulties, and he felt secure of him.
“Who but you, in all Paris, would give me such a fee for such an affair?” Claparon said to him, with a false show of naivete. “You can sleep in peace; my ostensible purchaser is one of those men of honor who are too stupid to have ideas of your kind; he is a retired government employee; give him the money to make the purchase and he’ll sign the counter-deed at once.”
When the notary had made Claparon clearly understand that he could not get more than the ten thousand francs from him, Cerizet offered the latter twelve thousand down, and asked Theodose for fifteen thousand, intending to keep the balance for himself. All these scenes between the four men were seasoned with the finest speeches about feelings, integrity, and the honor that men owed to one another in doing business. While these submarine performances were going on, apparently in the interests of Thuillier, to whom Theodose related them with the deepest manifestations of disgust at being implicated therein, the pair were meditating the great political work which “my dear good friend” was to publish. Thus the new municipal councillor naturally acquired a conviction that he could never do or be anything without the help of this man of genius; whose mind so amazed him, and whose ability was now so important to him, that every day he became more and more convinced of the necessity of marrying him to Celeste, and of taking the young couple to live with him. In fact, after May the 1st, Theodose had already dined four times a week with “my dear, good friend.”
This was the period when Theodose reigned without a dissenting voice in the bosom of that household, and all the friends of the family approved of him – for the following reason: The Phellions, hearing his praises sung by Brigitte and Thuillier, feared to displease the two powers and chorussed their words, even when such perpetual laudation seemed to them exaggerated. The same may be said of the Minards. Moreover la Peyrade’s behavior, as “friend of the family” was perfect. He disarmed distrust by the manner in which he effaced himself; he was there like a new piece of furniture; and he contrived to make both the Phellions and Minards believe that Brigitte and Thuillier had weighed him, and found him too light in the scales to be anything more in the family than a young man whose services were useful to them.
“He may think,” said Thuillier one day to Minard, “that my sister will put him in her will; he doesn’t know her.”
This speech, inspired by Theodose himself, calmed the uneasiness of Minard “pere.”
“He is devoted to us,” said Brigitte to Madame Phellion; “but he certainly owes us a great deal of gratitude. We have given him his lodging rent-free, and he dines with us almost every day.”
This speech of the old maid, also instigated by Theodose, went from ear to ear among the families who frequented the Thuillier salon, and dissipated all fears. The young man called attention to the remarks of Thuillier and his sister with the servility of a parasite; when he played whist he justified the blunders of his dear, good friend, and he kept upon his countenance a smile, fixed and benign, like that of Madame Thuillier, ready to bestow upon all the bourgeois sillinesses of the brother and sister.
He obtained, what he wanted above all, the contempt of his true antagonists; and he used it as a cloak to hide his real power. For four consecutive months his face wore a torpid expression, like that of a snake as it gulps and digests its prey. But at times he would rush into the garden with Colleville or Flavie, to laugh and lay off his mask, and rest himself; or get fresh strength by giving way before his future mother-in-law to fits of nervous passion which either terrified or deeply touched her.
“Don’t you pity me?” he cried to her the evening before the preparatory sale of the house, when Thuillier was to make the purchase at seventy-five thousand francs. “Think of a man like me, forced to creep like a cat, to choke down every pointed word, to swallow my own gall, and submit to your rebuffs!”
“My friend! my child!” Flavie replied, undecided in mind how to take him.
These words are a thermometer which will show the temperature at which this clever manipulator maintained his intrigue with Flavie. He kept her floating between her heart and her moral sense, between religious sentiments and this mysterious passion.
During this time Felix Phellion was giving, with a devotion and constancy worthy of all praise, regular lessons to young Colleville. He spent much of his time upon these lessons, feeling that he was thus working for his future family. To acknowledge this service, he was invited, by advice of Theodose to Flavie, to dine at the Collevilles’ every Thursday, where la Peyrade always met him. Flavie was usually making either a purse or slippers or a cigar-case for the happy young man, who would say, deprecatingly: —
“I am only too well rewarded, madame, by the happiness I feel in being useful to you.”
“We are not rich, monsieur,” replied Colleville, “but, God bless me! we are not ungrateful.”
Old Phellion would rub his hands as he listened to his son’s account of these evenings, beholding his dear and noble Felix already wedded to Celeste.
But Celeste, the more she loved Felix, the more grave and serious she became with him; partly because her mother sharply lectured her, saying to her one evening: —
“Don’t give any hope whatever to that young Phellion. Neither your father nor I can arrange your marriage. You have expectations to be consulted. It is much less important to please a professor without a penny than to make sure of the affection and good-will of Mademoiselle Brigitte and your godfather. If you don’t want to kill your mother – yes, my dear, kill her – you must obey me in this affair blindly; and remember that what we want to secure, above all, is your good.”
As the date of the final sale was set for the last of July, Theodose advised Brigitte by the end of June to arrange her affairs in time to be ready for the payment. Accordingly, she now sold out her own and her sister-in-law’s property in the Funds. The catastrophe of the treaty of the four powers, an insult to France, is now an established historical fact; but it is necessary to remind the reader that from July to the last of August the French funds, alarmed by the prospect of war, a fear which Monsieur Thiers did much to promote, fell twenty francs, and the Three-per-cents went down to sixty. That was not all: this financial fiasco had a most unfortunate influence on the value of real estate in Paris; and all those who had such property then for sale suffered loss. These events made Theodose a prophet in the eyes of Brigitte and Thuillier, to whom the house was now about to be definitely sold for seventy-five thousand francs. The notary, involved in the political disaster, and whose practice was already sold, concealed himself for a time in the country; but he took with him the ten thousand francs for Claparon. Advised by Theodose, Thuillier made a contract with Grindot, who supposed he was really working for the notary in finishing the house; and as, during this period of financial depression, suspended work left many workmen with their arms folded, the architect was able to finish off the building in a splendid manner at a low cost. Theodose insisted that the agreement should be in writing.
This purchase increased Thuillier’s importance ten-fold. As for the notary, he had temporarily lost his head in presence of political events which came upon him like a waterspout out of cloudless skies. Theodose, certain now of his supremacy, holding Thuillier fast by his past services and by the literary work in which they were both engaged, admired by Brigitte for his modesty and discretion, – for never had he made the slightest allusion to his own poverty or uttered one word about money, – Theodose began to assume an air that was rather less servile than it had been. Brigitte and Thuillier said to him one day: —
“Nothing can deprive you of our esteem; you are here in this house as if in your own home; the opinion of Minard and Phellion, which you seem to fear, has no more value for us than a stanza of Victor Hugo. Therefore, let them talk! Carry your head high!”
“But we shall still need them for Thuillier’s election to the Chamber,” said Theodose. “Follow my advice; you have found it good so far, haven’t you? When the house is actually yours, you will have got it for almost nothing; for you can now buy into the Three-per-cents at sixty in Madame Thuillier’s name, and thus replace nearly the whole of her fortune. Wait only for the expiration of the time allowed to the nominal creditor to buy it in, and have the fifteen thousand francs ready for our scoundrels.”
Brigitte did not wait; she took her whole capital with the exception of a sum of one hundred and twenty thousand francs, and bought into the Three-per-cents in Madame Thuillier’s name to the amount of twelve thousand francs a year, and in her own for ten thousand a year, resolving in her own mind to choose no other kind of investment in future. She saw her brother secure of forty thousand francs a year besides his pension, twelve thousand a year for Madame Thuillier and eighteen thousand a year for herself, besides the house they lived in, the rental of which she valued at eight thousand.
“We are worth quite as much as the Minards,” she remarked.
“Don’t chant victory before you win it,” said Theodose. “The right of redemption doesn’t expire for another week. I have attended to your affairs, but mine have gone terribly to pieces.”
“My dear child, you have friends,” cried Brigitte; “if you should happen to want five hundred francs or so, you will always find them here.”
Theodose exchanged a smile with Thuillier, who hastened to carry him off, saying: —
“Excuse my poor sister; she sees the world through a small hole. But if you should want twenty-five thousand francs I’ll lend them to you – out of my first rents,” he added.
“Thuillier,” exclaimed Theodose, “the rope is round my neck. Ever since I have been a barrister I have had notes of hand running. But say nothing about it,” added Theodose, frightened himself at having let out the secret of his situation. “I’m in the claws of scoundrels, but I hope to crush them yet.”
In telling this secret Theodose, though alarmed as he did so, had a two-fold purpose: first, to test Thuillier; and next, to avert the consequences of a fatal blow which might be dealt to him any day in a secret and sinister struggle he had long foreseen. Two words will explain his horrible position.
CHAPTER XII. DEVILS AGAINST DEVILS
During the extreme poverty of la Peyrade’s first years in Paris, none but Cerizet had ever gone to see him in the wretched garret where, in severely cold weather, he stayed in bed for want of clothes. Only one shirt remained to him. For three days he lived on one loaf of bread, cutting it into measured morsels, and asking himself, “What am I to do?” At this moment it was that his former partner came to him, having just left prison, pardoned. The projects which the two men then formed before a fire of laths, one wrapped in his landlady’s counterpane, the other in his infamy, it is useless to relate. The next day Cerizet, who had talked with Dutocq in the course of the morning, returned, bringing trousers, waistcoat, coat, hat, and boots, bought in the Temple, and he carried off Theodose to dine with himself and Dutocq. The hungry Provencal ate at Pinson’s, rue de l’Ancienne Comedie, half of a dinner costing forty-seven francs. At dessert, after Theodose had drunk freely, Cerizet said to him: —
“Will you sign me bills of exchange for fifty thousand francs in your capacity as a barrister?”
“You couldn’t get five thousand on them.”
“That’s not your affair, but ours; I mean monsieur’s here, who is giving us this dinner, and mine, in a matter where you risk nothing, but in which you’ll get your title as barrister, a fine practice, and the hand in marriage of a girl about the age of an old dog, and rich by twenty or thirty thousand francs a year. Neither Dutocq nor I can marry her; but we’ll equip you, give you the look of a decent man, feed and lodge you, and set you up generally. Consequently, we want security. I don’t say that on my own account, for I know you, but for monsieur here, whose proxy I am. We’ll equip you as a pirate, hey! to do the white-slave trade! If we can’t capture that ‘dot,’ we’ll try other plans. Between ourselves, none of us need be particular what we touch – that’s plain enough. We’ll give you careful instructions; for the matter is certain to take time, and there’ll probably be some bother about it. Here, see, I have brought stamped paper.”
“Waiter, pens and ink!” cried Theodose.
“Ha! I like fellows of that kind!” exclaimed Dutocq.
“Sign: ‘Theodose de la Peyrade,’ and after your name put ‘Barrister, rue Saint-Dominique d’Enfer,’ under the words ‘Accepted for ten thousand.’ We’ll date the notes and sue you, – all secretly, of course, but in order to have a hold upon you; the owners of a privateer ought to have security when the brig and the captain are at sea.”
The day after this interview the bailiff of the justice-of-peace did Cerizet the service of suing la Peyrade secretly. He went to see the barrister that evening, and the whole affair was done without any publicity. The Court of commerce has a hundred such cases in the course of one term. The strict regulations of the council of barristers of the bar of Paris are well known. This body, and also the council of attorneys, exercise severe discipline over their members. A barrister liable to go to Clichy would be disbarred. Consequently, Cerizet, under Dutocq’s advice, had taken against their puppet measures which were certain to secure to each of them twenty-five thousand francs out of Celeste’s “dot.” In signing the notes, Theodose saw but one thing, – his means of living secured; but as time had gone on, and the horizon grew clearer, and he mounted, step by step, to a better position on the social ladder, he began to dream of getting rid of his associates. And now, on obtaining twenty-five thousand francs from Thuillier, he hoped to treat on the basis of fifty per cent for the return of his fatal notes by Cerizet.
Unfortunately, this sort of infamous speculation is not an exceptional fact; it takes place in Paris under various forms too little disguised for the historian of manners and morals to pass them over unnoticed in a complete and accurate picture of society in the nineteenth century. Dutocq, an arrant scoundrel, still owed fifteen thousand francs on his practice, and lived in hopes of something turning up to keep his head, as the saying is, above water until the close of 1840. Up to the present time none of the three confederates had flinched or groaned. Each felt his strength and knew his danger. Equals they were in distrust, in watchfulness; equals, too, in apparent confidence; and equally stolid in silence and look when mutual suspicions rose to the surface of face or speech. For the last two months the position of Theodose was acquiring the strength of a detached fort. But Cerizet and Dutocq held it undermined by a mass of powder, with the match ever lighted; but the wind might extinguish the match or the devil might flood the mine.
The moment when wild beasts seize their food is always the most critical, and that moment had now arrived for these three hungry tigers. Cerizet would sometimes say to Theodose, with that revolutionary glance which twice in this century sovereigns have had to meet: —
“I have made you king, and here am I still nothing! for it is nothing not to be all.”
A reaction of envy was rushing its avalanche through Cerizet. Dutocq was at the mercy of his copying clerk. Theodose would gladly have burned his copartners could he have burned their papers in the same conflagration. All three studied each other too carefully, in order to conceal their own thoughts, not to be in turn divined. Theodose lived a life of three hells as he thought of what lay below the cards, then of his own game, and then of his future. His speech to Thuillier was a cry of despair; he threw his lead into the waters of the old bourgeois and found there nothing more than twenty-five thousand francs.
“And,” he said to himself as he went to his own room, “possibly nothing at all a month hence.”
He new felt the deepest hatred to the Thuilliers. But Thuillier himself he held by a harpoon stuck into the depths of the man’s vanity; namely, by the projected work, entitled “Taxation and the Sinking Fund,” for which he intended to rearrange the ideas of the Saint-Simonian “Globe,” giving them a systematic form, and coloring them with his fervid Southern diction. Thuillier’s bureaucratic knowledge of the subject would be of use to him here. Theodose therefore clung to this rope, resolving to do battle, on so poor a base of operations, with the vanity of a fool, which, according to individual character, is either granite or sand. On reflection, Theodose was inclined to be content with the prospect.
On the evening before the right of redemption expired, Claparon and Cerizet proceeded to manipulate the notary in the following manner. Cerizet, to whom Claparon had revealed the password and the notary’s retreat, went out to this hiding-place to say to the latter: —
“One of my friends, Claparon, whom you know, has asked me to come and see you; he will expect you to-morrow, in the evening, you know where. He has the paper you expect from him, which he will exchange with you for the ten thousand agreed upon; but I must be present, for five thousand of that sum belong to me; and I warn you, my dear monsieur, that the name in the counter-deed is in blank.”
“I shall be there,” replied the ex-notary.
The poor devil waited the whole night in agonies of mind that can well be imagined, for safety or inevitable ruin were in the balance. At sunrise he saw approaching him, instead of Claparon, a bailiff of the Court of commerce, who produced a judgment against him in regular form, and informed him that he must go with him to Clichy.
Cerizet had made an arrangement with one of the creditors of the luckless notary, pledging himself to deliver up the debtor on payment to himself of half the debt. Out of the ten thousand francs promised to Claparon, the victim of this trap was obliged, in order to obtain his liberty, to pay six thousand down, the amount of his debt.
On receiving his share of this extortion Cerizet said to himself: “There’s three thousand to make Cerizet clear out.”
Cerizet then returned to the notary and said: “Claparon is a scoundrel, monsieur; he has received fifteen thousand francs from the proposed purchaser of your house, who will now, of course, become the owner. Threaten to reveal his hiding-place to his creditors, and to have him sued for fraudulent bankruptcy, and he’ll give you half.”
In his wrath the notary wrote a fulminating letter to Claparon. Claparon, alarmed, feared an arrest, and Cerizet offered to get him a passport.
“You have played me many a trick, Claparon,” he said, “but listen to me now, and you can judge of my kindness. I possess, as my whole means, three thousand francs; I’ll give them to you; start for America, and make your fortune there, as I’m trying to make mine here.”
That evening Claparon, carefully disguised by Cerizet, left for Havre by the diligence. Cerizet remained master of the fifteen thousand francs to be paid to Claparon, and he awaited Theodose with the payment thereof tranquilly.
“The limit for bidding-in is passed,” thought Theodose, as he went to find Dutocq and ask him to bring Cerizet to his office. “Suppose I were now to make an effort to get rid of my leech?”
“You can’t settle this affair anywhere but at Cerizet’s, because Claparon must be present, and he is hiding there,” said Dutocq.
Accordingly, Theodose went, between seven and eight o’clock, to the den of the “banker of the poor,” whom Dutocq had notified of his coming. Cerizet received him in the horrible kitchen where miseries and sorrows were chopped and cooked, as we have seen already. The pair then walked up and down, precisely like two animals in a cage, while mutually playing the following scene: —
“Have you brought the fifteen thousand francs?”
“No, but I have them at home.”
“Why not have them in your pocket?” asked Cerizet, sharply.
“I’ll tell you,” replied Theodose, who, as he walked from the rue Saint-Dominique to the Estrapade, had decided on his course of action.
The Provencal, writhing upon the gridiron on which his partners held him, became suddenly possessed with a good idea, which flashed from the body of the live coal under him. Peril has gleams of light. He resolved to rely on the power of frankness, which affects all men, even swindlers. Every one is grateful to an adversary who bares himself to the waist in a duel.
“Well!” said Cerizet, “now the humbug begins.”
The words seemed to come wholly through the hole in his nose with horrible intonations.
“You have put me in a magnificent position, and I shall never forget the service you have done me, my friend,” began Theodose, with emotion.
“Oh, that’s how you take it, is it?” said Cerizet.
“Listen to me; you don’t understand my intentions.”
“Yes, I do!” replied the lender by “the little week.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You intend not to give up those fifteen thousand francs.”
Theodose shrugged his shoulders and looked fixedly at Cerizet, who, struck by the two motions, kept silence.
“Would you live in my position, knowing yourself within range of a cannon loaded with grape-shot, without feeling a strong desire to get out of it? Now listen to me carefully. You are doing a dangerous business, and you would be glad enough to have some solid protection in the very heart of the magistracy of Paris. If I can continue my present course, I shall be substitute attorney-general, possibly attorney-general, in three years. I offer you to-day the offices of a devoted friendship, which will serve you hereafter most assuredly, if only to replace you in a honorable position. Here are my conditions – ”
“Conditions!” exclaimed Cerizet.
“In ten minutes I will bring you twenty-five thousand francs if you return to me all the notes which you have against me.”
“But Dutocq? and Claparon?” said Cerizet.
“Leave them in the lurch!” replied Theodose, with his lips at Cerizet’s ear.
“That’s a pretty thing to say!” cried Cerizet. “And so you have invented this little game of hocus-pocus because you hold in your fingers fifteen thousand francs that don’t belong to you!”
“But I’ve added ten thousand francs to them. Besides, you and I know each other.”
“If you are able to get ten thousand francs out of your bourgeois you can surely get fifteen,” said Cerizet. “For thirty thousand I’m your man. Frankness for frankness, you know.”
“You ask the impossible,” replied Theodose. “At this very moment, if you had to do with Claparon instead of with me, your fifteen thousand would be lost, for Thuillier is to-day the owner of that house.”
“I’ll speak to Claparon,” said Cerizet, pretending to go and consult him, and mounting the stairs to the bedroom, from which Claparon had only just departed on his road to Havre.
The two adversaries had been speaking, we should here remark, in a manner not to be overheard; and every time that Theodose raised his voice Cerizet would make a gesture, intimating that Claparon, from above, might be listening. The five minutes during which Theodose heard what seemed to be the murmuring of two voices were torture to him, for he had staked his very life upon the issue. Cerizet at last came down, with a smile upon his lips, his eyes sparkling with infernal mischief, his whole frame quivering in his joy, a Lucifer of gaiety!
“I know nothing, so it seems!” he cried, shaking his shoulders, “but Claparon knows a great deal; he has worked with the big-wig bankers, and when I told what you wanted he began to laugh, and said, ‘I thought as much!’ You will have to bring me the twenty-five thousand you offer me to-morrow morning, my lad; and as much more before you can recover your notes.”
“Why?” asked Theodose, feeling his spinal column liquidizing as if the discharge of some inward electric fluid had melted it.
“The house is ours.”
“How?”
“Claparon has bit it in under the name of one of his creditors, a little toad named Sauvaignou. Desroches, the lawyer, has taken the case, and you’ll get a notice to-morrow. This affair will oblige Claparon, Dutocq, and me to raise funds. What would become of me without Claparon! So I forgive him – yes, I forgave him, and though you may not believe it, my dear friend, I actually kissed him! Change your terms.”
The last three words were horrible to hear, especially when illustrated by the face of the speaker, who amused himself by playing a scene from the “Legataire,” all the while studying attentively the Provencal’s character.
“Oh, Cerizet!” cried Theodose; “I, who wished to do you so much good!”
“Don’t you see, my dear fellow,” returned Cerizet, “that between you and me there ought to be this, – ” and he struck his heart, – “of which you have none. As soon as you thought you had a lever on us, you have tried to knock us over. I saved you from the horrors of starvation and vermin! You’ll die like the idiot you are. We put you on the high-road to fortune; we gave you a fine social skin and a position in which you could grasp the future – and look what you do! Now I know you! and from this time forth, we shall go armed.”
“Then it is war between us!” exclaimed Theodose.
“You fired first,” returned Cerizet.
“If you pull me down, farewell to your hopes and plans; if you don’t pull me down, you have in me an enemy.”
“That’s just what I said yesterday to Dutocq; but, how can we help it? We are forced to choose between two alternatives – we must go according to circumstances. I’m a good-natured fellow myself,” he added, after a pause; “bring me your twenty-five thousand francs to-morrow morning and Thuillier shall keep the house. We’ll continue to help you at both ends, but you’ll have to pay up, my boy. After what has just happened that’s pretty kind, isn’t it?”
And Cerizet patted Theodose on the shoulder, with a cynicism that seemed to brand him more than the iron of the galleys.
“Well, give me till to-morrow at mid-day,” replied the Provencal, “for there’ll be, as you said, some manipulation to do.”
“I’ll try to keep Claparon quiet; he’s in such a hurry, that man!”
“To-morrow then,” said Theodose, in the tone of a man who decides his course.
“Good-night, friend,” said Cerizet, in his nasal tone, which degraded the finest word in the language. “There’s one who has got a mouthful to suck!” thought Cerizet, as he watched Theodose going down the street with the step of a dazed man.
When la Peyrade reached the rue des Postes he went with rapid strides to Madame Colleville’s house, exciting himself as he walked along, and talking aloud. The fire of his roused passions and the sort of inward conflagration of which many Parisians are conscious (for such situations abound in Paris) brought him finally to a pitch of frenzy and eloquence which found expression, as he turned into the rue des Deux-Eglises, in the words: —
“I will kill him!”
“There’s a fellow who is not content!” said a passing workman, and the jesting words calmed the incandescent madness to which Theodose was a prey.
As he left Cerizet’s the idea came to him to go to Flavie and tell her all. Southern natures are born thus – strong until certain passions arise, and then collapsed. He entered Flavie’s room; she was alone, and when she saw Theodose she fancied her last hour had come.