"Why?"

"Because I hold all the mother's jewels and she's on tenter-hooks
every three months, I can tell you! It is hard work for her to pay the
interest on what I've lent her. Do you want to marry there,
simpleton?" she added, addressing Gazonal; "then pay me forty francs
and I'll talk four hundred worth."

Gazonal produced a forty-franc gold-piece, and Madame Nourrisson gave
him startling details as to the secret penury of certain so-called
fashionable women. This dealer in cast-off clothes, getting lively as
she talked, pictured herself unconsciously while telling of others.
Without betraying a single name or any secret, she made the three men
shudder by proving to them how little so-called happiness existed in
Paris that did not rest on the vacillating foundation of borrowed
money. She possessed, laid away in her drawers, the secrets of
departed grandmothers, living children, deceased husbands, dead
granddaughters,--memories set in gold and diamonds. She learned
appalling stories by making her clients talk of one another; tearing
their secrets from them in moments of passion, of quarrels, of anger,
and during those cooler negotiations which need a loan to settle
difficulties.

"Why were you ever induced to take up such a business?" asked Gazonal.

"For my son's sake," she said naively.

Such women almost invariably justify their trade by alleging noble
motives. Madame Nourrisson posed as having lost several opportunities
for marriage, also three daughters who had gone to the bad, and all