To all these cajoleries, Marguerite herself presented the contrast of actual distress, shown sometimes by a word of doubt, sometimes by a glance along the empty shelves of the sideboards in the dining-room.
"Well, well," he said, following her eyes, "in six months we shall fill them again with gold, and marvellous things.

You shall be like a queen.
Bah! nature herself will belong to us, we shall rise above all created beings--through you, you my Marguerite! Margarita," he said, smiling, "thy name is a prophecy.

'Margarita' means a pearl.

Sterne says so somewhere.

Did you ever read Sterne?
Would you like to have a Sterne?
it would amuse you." "A pearl, they say, is the result of a disease," she answered; "we have suffered enough already." "Do not be sad; you will make the happiness of those you love; you shall be rich and all-powerful." "Mademoiselle has got such a good heart," said Lemulquinier, whose seamed face stretched itself painfully into a smile.
For the rest of the evening Balthazar displayed to his daughters all the natural graces of his character and the charms of his conversation.
Seductive as the serpent, his lips, his eyes, poured out a magnetic fluid; he put forth that power of genius, that gentleness of spirit, which once fascinated Josephine and now drew, as it were, his daughters into his heart.