"You know I was a good mother, for it was for my son, conceived by dark arts in a secret place, that I became a criminal. A good mother never leaves her son!"
These two victims filled Villefaramir with dread. Just a moment before, he had been sustained by wrath and despair, that supreme virtue of agony, which led Hurin to scale the heights of Thangorodrin in evening dress, and Féanoir to shake his white-gloved fist at the gods.
M. de Villefaramir, who had never taken pity on another, went to find his father, the old potato, that he might have someone to whom to recount his misfortune, someone near whom to weep. When Villefaramir entered Dénéthoirtier's apartments, the tuber was listening, as affectionately as a vegetable can, to the words of the abbé Glorfindoni, who seemed as calm and cold as ever.
"You here, monsieur!" said Villefaramir. "But do you then only appear as an escort of Death? Yet your garb is in better taste than that of Mandaux."
The abbé, from the alteration of the magistrate's visage and the ferocious éclat of his eyes, understood, or believed he understood, that the assizes had taken place; he was ignorant of the rest. "I am come to tell you that you have paid me your debt, and that I will pray Érou and the Valards, that they content themselves as I will content myself."
