All this was done with military obedience, except in a matter
of withholding thirty thousand francs for the personal expenses of
Madame and Mademoiselle Mignon as the colonel had ordered him to do,
but which Dumay did not do. The Breton sold his own little house for
twenty thousand francs, which sum he gave to Madame Mignon, believing
that the more capital he sent to his colonel the sooner the latter
would return.
"He might perish for the want of thirty thousand francs," Dumay
remarked to Latournelle, who bought the little house at its full
value, where an apartment was always kept ready for the inhabitants of
the Chalet.
CHAPTER IV
A SIMPLE STORY
Such was the result to the celebrated house of Mignon at Havre of the
crisis of 1825-26, which convulsed many of the principal business
centres in Europe and caused the ruin of several Parisian bankers,
among them (as those who remember that crisis will recall) the
president of the chamber of commerce.
We can now understand how this great disaster, coming suddenly at the
close of ten years of domestic happiness, might well have been the
death of Bettina Mignon, again separated from her husband and ignorant
of his fate,--to her as adventurous and perilous as the exile to
Siberia.
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