TWO BANQUETS AT DIVES.
CHAPTER XX.
A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY REVIVAL.
Outside the inn, some two hundred years ago, there was a great noise and confusion; the cries of outriders, of mounted guardsmen and halberdiers, made the quiet village as noisy as a camp. An imposing cavalcade was being brought to a sharp stop; for the outriders had suddenly perceived the open inn entrance, with its raised portcullis, and they were shouting to the coachmen to turn in, beneath the archway, to the paved court-yard within.
In an incredibly short space of time the open quadrangle presented a brilliant picture; the dashing guardsmen were dismounting; the maids and lackeys had quickly descended from their perches in the caleches and coaches; and the gentlemen of the household were dusting their wide hats and lace-trimmed coats. The halberdiers, ranging themselves in line, made a prismatic grouping beneath the low eaves of the picturesque old inn. In the very middle of the court-yard stood a coach, resplendent in painted panels and emblazoned with ducal arms. About this coach, as soon as the four horses which drew the vehicle were brought to a standstill, cavaliers, footmen, and maids swarmed with effusive zeal. One of the footmen made a rush for the door: another let down the steps; one cavalier was already presenting an outstretched, deferential hand, while still another held forth an arm, as rigid as a post, for the use of the occupants of the ducal carriage.
Three ladies were seated within. Large and roomy as was the vehicle, their voluminous draperies and the paraphernalia of their belongings seemed completely to fill the wide, deep seats. The ladies were the Duchesse de Chaulnes, Madame de Kerman, and Madame de Sévigné. The faces of the Duchesse and of Madame de Kerman were invisible, being still covered with their masks, which, both as a matter of habit and of precaution against the sun's rays, they had religiously worn during the long day's journey. But Madame de Sévigné had torn hers off; she was holding it in her hand, as if glad to be relieved from its confinement.
All three ladies were in the highest possible spirits, Madame de
Sévigné obviously being the leader of the jests and the laughter.
They were in a mood to find everything amusing and delightful. Even after they had left the coach and were carefully picking their way over the rough stones—walking on their high-heeled "mules" at best, was always a dangerous performance—their laughter and gayety continued in undiminished exuberance. Madame de Sévigné's keen sense of humor found so many things to ridicule. Could anything, for example, be more comical than the spectacle they presented as they walked, in state, with their long trains and high-heeled slippers, up these absurd little turret steps, feeling their way as carefully as if they were each a pickpocket or an assassin? The long line behind of maids carrying their muffs, and of lackeys with the muff-dogs, and of pages holding their trains, and the grinning innkeeper, bursting with pride and courtesying as if he had St. Vitus's dance, all this crowd coiling round the rude spiral stairway—it was enough to make one die of laughter. Such state in such savage surroundings!—they and their patch-boxes, and towering head-gears and trains, and dogs and fans, all crowded into a place fit only for peasants!
When they reached their bedchambers the ridicule was turned into a condescending admiration; they found their rooms unexpectedly clean and airy. The furniture was all antique, of interesting design, and though rude, really astonishingly comfortable. Beds and dressing-tables, mostly of Henry III's time, were elaborately canopied in the hideous crude draperies of that primitive epoch. How different were the elegant shapes and brocades of their own time! Fortunately their women had suitable hangings and draperies with them, as well, of course, as any amount of linen and any number of mattresses. The settees and benches would do very well, with the aid of their own hassocks and cushions, and, after all, it was only for a night, they reminded the other.
The toilet, after the heat and exposure of the day, was necessarily a long one. The Duchesse and Madame de Kerman had their faces to make up—all the paint had run, and not a patch was in its place. Hair, also, of this later de Maintenon period, with its elaborate artistic ranges of curls, to say nothing of the care that must be given to the coif and the "follette," these were matters that demanded the utmost nicety of arrangement.
In an hour, however, the three ladies reassembled, in the panelled lower room—in "la Chambre de la Pucelle." In spite of the care her two companions had given to repairing the damages caused by their journey, of the three, Madame de Sévigné looked by far the freshest and youngest. She still wore her hair in the loosely flowing de Montespan fashion; a style which, though now out of date, was one that exactly suited her fair skin, her candid brow, and her brilliant eyes. These latter, when one examined them closely, were found to be of different colors; but this peculiarity, which might have been a serious defect in any other countenance, in Madame de Sévigné's brilliant face was perhaps one cause of its extraordinarily luminous quality. Not one feature was perfect in that fascinatingly mobile face: the chin was a trifle too long for a woman's chin; the lips, that broke into such delicious curves when she laughed, when at rest betrayed the firmness of her wit and the almost masculine quality of her reasoning judgment. Even her arms and hands and her shoulders were "mal taillés" as her contemporaries would have told you. But what a charm in those irregular features! What a seductiveness in the ensemble of that not too-well-proportioned figure! What an indescribable radiance seemed to emanate from the entire personality of this most captivating of women!
As she moved about the low room, dark with the trembling shadows of light that flowed from the bunches of candles in the sconces, Madame de Sévigné's clear complexion, and her unpowdered chestnut curls, seemed to spot the room with light. Her companions, though dressed in the very height of the fashion, were yet not half as catching to the eye. Neither their minute waists, nor their elaborate underskirts and trains, nor their tall coffered coifs (the duchesse's was not unlike a bishop's mitre, studded as it was with ruby-headed pins), nor the correctness of these ladies' carefully placed patches, nor yet their painted necks and tinted eyebrows, could charm as did the unmodish figure of Madame de Sévigné—a figure so indifferently clad, and yet one so replete with its distinction of innate elegance and the subtle charm of her individuality.
With the entrance of these ladies dinner was served at once. The talk flowed on; it was, however, more or less restrained by the presence of the always too curious lackeys, of the bustling innkeeper, and the gentlemen of the household in attendance on the party. As a spectacle, the little room had never boasted before of such an assemblage of fashion and greatness. Never before had the air under the rafters been so loaded with scents and perfumes—these ladies seeming, indeed, to breathe out odors. Never before had there been grouped there such splendor of toilet, nor had such courtly accents been heard, nor such finished laughter. The fire and the candlelight were in competition which should best light up the tall transparent caps, the lace fichus, the brocade bodices, and the long trains. The little muff-dogs, released from their prisons, since the muffs were laid aside at dinner time, blinked at the fire, curling their minute bodies—clipped lion-fashion—about the huge andirons, as they snored to kill time, knowing their own dinner would come only when their mistresses had done.
After the dessert had been served the ladies withdrew; they were preceded by the ever-bowing innkeeper, who assured them, in his most reverential tones, that they would find the room opening on the other court-yard even warmer and more comfortable than the one they were in. In spite of the walk across the paved court-yard and the enormous height of their heels, always a fact to be remembered, the ladies voted to make the change, since by that means they could be assured the more entire seclusion. Mild as was the May air, Madame de Kerman's hand-glass hanging at her side was quickly lifted in the very middle of the open court-yard; she had scarcely passed the door when she had felt one of her patches blowing off.
"I caught it just in time, dear duchesse," she cried, as she stood quite still, replacing it with a fresh one picked from her patch-box, as the others passed her.
"The very best patch-maker I have found lives in the rue St. Denis, at the sign of La Perle des Mouches; have you discovered him, dear friend?" said the duchesse, as they walked on toward the low door beneath the galleries.
"No, dear duchesse, I fear I have not even looked for him—the science of patches I have always found so much harder than the science of living!" gayly answered Madame de Sévigné.
Madame de Kerman had now re joined them, and all three passed into la
Chambre des Marmousets.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE AFTER-DINNER TALK OF THREE GREAT LADIES.
The three ladies grouped themselves about the fire, which they found already lighted. The duchesse chose a Henry II. carved aim chair, one, she laughingly remarked, quite large enough to have held both the King and Diana. A lackey carrying the inevitable muff-dogs, their fans, and scent-bottles, had followed the ladies; he placed a hassock at the duchesse's feet, two beneath the slender feet of Madame de Kerman, and, after having been bidden to open one of the casements, since it was still so light without, withdrew, leaving the ladies alone.
Although Madame de Sévigné had comfortably ensconced herself in one of the deep window seats, piling the cushions behind her, no sooner was the window opened than with characteristic impetuosity she jumped up to look out into the country that lay beyond the leaded glass. In spite of the long day's drive in the open air, her appetite for blowing roses and sweet earth smells had not been sated. Madame de Sévigné all her life had been the victim of two loves and a passion; she adored society and she loved nature; these were her lesser delights, that gave way before the chief idolatry of her soul, her adoration for her daughter.
[Illustration: MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ]
As she stood by the open window, her charming face, always a mirror of her emotions, was suffused with a glow and a bloom that made it seem young again. Her eyes grew to twice their common size under the "wandering" eyelids, as her gaze roved over the meadows and across the tall grasses to the sea. A part of her youth was being, indeed, vividly brought back to her; the sight of this marine landscape recalled many memories; and with the recollection her whole face and figure seemed to irradiate something of the inward ardor that consumed her. She had passed this very road, through this same country before, long ago, in her youth, with her children. She half smiled at the remembrance of a description given of the impression produced by her appearance on the journey by her friend the Abbé Arnauld; he had ecstatically compared her to Latona seated in an open coach, between a youthful Apollo and a young Diana. In spite of the abbe's poetical extravagance, Madame de Sévigné recognized, in this moment of retrospect, the truth of the picture. That, indeed, had been a radiant moment! Her life at that time had been so full, and the rapture so complete—the rapture of possessing her children—that she could remember to have had the sense of fairly evaporating happiness. And now, the sigh came, how scattered was this gay group! her son in Brittany, her daughter in Provence, two hundred leagues away! And she, an elderly Latona, mourning her Apollo and her divine huntress, her incomparable Diana.
The inextinguishable name of youth was burning still, however, in Madame de Sévigné's rich nature. This adventure, this amazing adventure of three ladies of the court having to pass the night in a rude little Normandy inn, she, for one, was finding richly seasoned with the spice of the unforeseen; it would be something to talk of and write about for a month hence at Chaulnes and at Paris. Their entire journey, in point of fact, had been a series of the most delightful episodes. It was now nearly a month since they had started from Picardy, from the castle of Chaulnes, going into Normandy via Rouen. They had been on a driving tour, their destination being Rennes, which they would reach in a week or so. They had been travelling in great state, with the very best coach, the very best horses; and they had been guarded by a whole regiment of cavaliers and halberdiers. Every possible precaution had been taken \against their being disagreeably surprised on their route. Their chief fear on the journey had been, of course, the cry common in their day of "Au voleur!" and the meeting of brigands and assassins; for, once outside of Paris and the police reforms of that dear Colbert, and one must be prepared to take one's life in one's hand. Happily, no such misadventures had befallen them. The roads, it is true, they had found for the most part in a horrible condition; they had been pitched about from one end of their coach to the other they might easily have imagined themselves at sea. The dust also had nearly blinded them, in spite of their masks. The other nuisances most difficult to put up with had been the swarm of beggars that infested the roadsides; and worst of all had been the army of crippled, deformed, and mangy soldiers. These latter they had encountered everywhere; their whines and cries, their armless, legless bodies, their hideous filth, and their insolent importunities, they had found a veritable pest.
Another annoyance had been the over-zealous courtesy of some of the upper middle-class. Only yesterday, in the very midst of the dust and under the burning noon sun, they had all been forced to alight, to receive the homage tendered the duchesse, of some thirty women and as many men. Each one of the sixty must, of course, kiss the duchesse's hand. It was really an outrage to have exposed them to such a form of torture! Poor Madame de Kerman, the delicate one of the party, had entirely collapsed after the ceremony. The duchesse also had been prostrated; it had wearied her more than all the rest of the journey. Madame de Sévigné alone had not suffered. She was possessed of a degree of physical fortitude which made her equal to any demand. The other two ladies, as well as she herself, were now experiencing the pleasant exhilaration which comes with the hour of rest after an excellent dinner. They were in a condition to remember nothing except the agreeable. Madame de Sévigné was the first to break the silence.
She turned, with a brisk yet graceful abruptness, to the two ladies still seated before the low fire. With a charming outburst of enthusiasm she exclaimed aloud:
"What a beauty, and youth, and tenderness this spring has, has it not?"
"Yes," answered the duchesse, smiling graciously into Madame de Sévigné's brilliantly lit face; "yes, the weather in truth has been perfect."
"What an adorable journey we have had!" continued Madame de Sévigné, in the same tone, her ardor undampened by the cooler accent of her friend—she was used to having her enthusiasm greeted with consideration rather than response. "What a journey!—only meeting with the most agreeable of adventures; not the slightest inconvenience anywhere; eating the very best of everything; and driving through the heart of this enchanting springtime!"
Her listeners laughed quietly, with an accent of indulgence. It was the habit of her world to find everything Madame de Sévigné did or said charming. Even her frankness was forgiven her, her tact was so perfect; and her spontaneity had always been accounted as her chief excellence; in the stifled air of the court and the ruelles it had been frequently likened to the blowing in of a fresh May breeze. Her present mood was one well known to both ladies.
"Always 'pretty pagan,' dear madame," smiled Madame de Kerman, indulgently. "How well named—and what a happy hit of our friend Arnauld d'Audilly! You are in truth a delicious—an adorable pagan! You have such a sense of the joy of living! Why, even living in the country has, it appears, no terrors for you. We hear of your walking about in the moonlight-you make your very trees talk, they tell us, in Italian—in Latin; you actually pass whole hours alone with the hamadryads!" There was just a suspicion of irony in Madame de Kerman's tone, in spite of its caressing softness; it was so impossible to conceive of anyone really finding nature endurable, much less pretending to discover in trees and flowers anything amusing or suggestive of sentiment!
But Madame de Sévigné was quite impervious to her friend's raillery.
She responded, with perfect good humor:
"Why not?—why not try to discover beauties in nature? One can be so happy in a wood! What a charming thing to hear a leaf sing! I know few things more delightful than to watch the triumph of the month of May when the nightingale, the cuckoo, and the lark open the spring in our forests! And then, later, come those beautiful crystal days of autumn—days that are neither warm, nor yet are they really cold! And then the trees—how eloquent they can be made; with a little teaching they may be made to converse so charmingly. Bella cosa far aniente, says one of my trees; and another answers, Amor odit inertes. Ah, when I had to bid farewell to all my leaves and trees; when my son had to dispose of the forest of Buron, to pay for some of his follies, you remember how I wept! It seemed to me I could actually feel the grief of those dispossessed sylvans and of all those homeless dryads!"
"It is this, dear friend—this life you lead at Les Rochers—and your enthusiasm, which keep you so young. Yes, I am sure of it. How inconceivably young, for instance, you are looking this very evening! You and the glow out yonder make youth seem no longer a legend."
The duchesse delivered her flattering little speech with a caressing tone. She moved gently forward in her chair, as if to gain a better view of the twilight and her friend. At the sound of the duchesse's voice Madame de Sévigné again turned, with the same charming smile and the quick impulsiveness of movement common to her. During her long monologue she had remained standing; but she left the window now to regain her seat amid the cushions of the window. There was something better than the twilight and the spring in the air; here, within, were two delightful friends-and listeners; there was before her, also, the prospect of one of those endless conversations that were the chief delight of her life.
She laughed as she seated herself—a gay, frank, hearty little laugh—and she spread out her hands with the opening of her fan, as, with her usual vivacious spontaneity, her mood changed.
"Fancy, dear duchesse, the punishment that comes to one who commits the crime of looking young—younger than one ought! My son-in-law, M. de Grignan, actually avows he is in daily terror lest I should give him a father-in-law!"
All three ladies laughed gayly at this absurdity; the subject of Madame de Sévigné's remarrying had come to be a venerable joke now. It had been talked of at court and in society for nearly forty years; but such was the conquering power of her charms that these two friends, her listeners, saw nothing really extravagant in her son-in-law's fear; she was one of those rare women who, even at sixty, continue to suggest the altar rather than the grave. Madame de Kerman was the first to recover her breath after the laughter.
"Dear friend, you might assure him that after a youth and the golden meridian of your years passed in smiling indifference to the sighs of a Prince de Conti, of a Turenne, of a Fouquet, of a Bussy de Rabutin, at sixty it is scarcely likely that—"
"Ah, dear lady at sixty, when one has the complexion and the curls, to say nothing of the eyes of our dear enchantress, a woman is as dangerous as at thirty!" The duchesse's flattery was charmingly put, with just enough vivacity of tone to save it from the charge of insipidity. Madame de Sévigné bowed her curls to her waist.
"Ah, dear duchesse, it isn't age," she retorted, quickly, "that could make me commit follies. It is the fact that that son-in-law of mine actually surrounds me with spies—he keeps me in perpetual surveillance. Such a state of captivity is capable of making me forget everything; I am beginning to develop a positive rage for follies. You know that has been my chief fault—always; discretion has been left out of my composition. But I say now, as I have always said, that if I could manage to live two hundred years, I should become the most delightful person in the world!"
She herself was the first to lead in the laughter that followed her outburst; and then the duchesse broke in:
"You talk of defects, dear friend; but reflect what a life yours has been. So surrounded and courted, and yet you were always so guarded; so free, and yet so wise! So gay, and yet so chaste!"
"If you rubbed out all those flattering colors, dear duchesse, and wrote only, 'She worshipped her children, and preferred friends to lovers,' the portrait would be far nearer to the truth. It is easy to be chaste if one has only known one passion in one's life, and that the maternal one!"
Again a change passed over Madame de Sévigné's mobile face; the bantering tone was lost in a note of deep feeling. This gift of sensibility had always been accounted as one of Madame de Sévigné's chief charms; and now, at sixty, she was as completely the victim of her moods as in her earlier youth.
"Where is your daughter, and how is she?" sympathetically queried the duchesse.
"Oh, she is still at Grignan, as usual; she is well, thank God. But, dear duchesse, after all these years of separation I suffer still, cruelly." The tears sprang to Madame de Sévigné's eyes, as she added, with passion and a force one would scarcely have expected in one whose manners were so finished, "the truth is, dear friends, I cannot live without her. I do not find I have made the least progress in that career. But, even now, believe me, these tears are sweeter than all else in life—more enrapturing than the most transporting joy!"
Madame de Kerman smiled tenderly into the rapturous mother's face; but the duchesse moved, as if a little restless and uneasy under this shower of maternal feeling. For thirty years her friends had had to listen to Madame de Sévigné's rhapsodies over the perfections of her incomparable daughter. Although sensibility was not the emotional fashion of the day, maternity, in the person of Madame de Sévigné, had been apotheosized into the queen of the passions, if only because of its rarity; still, even this lady's most intimate friends sometimes wearied of banqueting off the feast of Madame de Grignan's virtues.
"Have you heard from Madame de La Fayette recently?" asked the duchesse, allowing just time enough to elapse, before putting the question, for Madame de Sévigné's emotion to subside into composure. The duchesse was too exquisitely bred to allow her impatience to take the form of even the appearance of haste.
"Oh, yes," was Madame de Sévigné's quiet reply; the turn in the conversation had been instantly understood, in spite of the delicacy of the duchesse's methods. "Oh, yes—I have had a line—only a line. You know how she detests writing, above all things. Her letters are all the same—two lines to say that she has no time in which to say it!"
"Did she not once write you a pretty little series of epigrams about not writing?"
"Oh, yes—some time ago, when I was with my daughter. I've quoted them so often, they have become famous. 'You are in Provence, my beauty; your hours are free, and your mind still more so. Your love for corresponding with everyone still endures within you, it appears; as for me, the desire to write to any human being has long since passed away-forever; and if I had a lover who insisted on a letter every morning, I should certainly break with him!'"
"What a curious compound she is! And how well her soubriquet becomes her!"
"Yes, it is perfect—'Le Brouillard'—the fog. It is indeed a fog that has always enveloped her, and what charming horizons are disclosed once it is lifted!"
"And her sensibilities—of what an exquisite quality; and what a rare, precious type, indeed, is the whole of her nature! Do you remember how alarmed she would become when listening to music?"
"And yet, with all this sensibility and delicacy of organization there was another side to her nature." Madame de Kerman paused a moment before she went on; she was not quite sure how far she dared go in her criticism; Madame de La Fayette was such an intimate friend of Madame de Sévigné's.
"You mean," that lady broke out, with unhesitating candor, "that she is also a very selfish person. You know that is my daughter's theory of her—she is always telling me how Madame de La Fayette is making use of me; that while her sensitiveness is such that she cannot sustain the tragedy of a farewell visit—if I am going to Les Rochers or to Provence, when I go to pay my last visit I must pretend it is only an ordinary running-in; yet her delicacy does not prevent her from making very indelicate proposals, to suit her own convenience. You remember what one of her commands was, don't you?"
"No," answered the duchesse, for both herself and her companion. "Pray tell us."
Madame de Sévigné went on to narrate that once, when at Les Rochers, Madame de La Fayette was quite certain that she, Madame de Sévigné, was losing her mind, for no one could live in the provinces and remain sane, poring over stupid books and sitting over fires.
"She was certain I should sicken and die, besides losing the tone of my mind," laughed Madame de Sévigné, as she called up the picture of her dissolution and rapid disintegration; "and therefore it was necessary at once that I should come up to Paris. This latter command was delivered in the tone of a judge of the Supreme Court. The penalty of my disobedience was to be her ceasing to love me. I was to come up to Paris directly—on the minute; I was to live with you, dear duchesse; I was not to buy any horses until spring; and, best of all, I was to find on my arrival a purse of a thousand crowns which would be lent me without interest! What a proposition, mon Dieu, what a proposition! To have no house of my own, to be dependent, to have no carriage, and to be in debt a thousand crowns!"
As Madame de Sévigné lifted her hands the laces of her sleeves were fairly trembling with the force of her indignation. There were certain things that always put her in a passion, and Madame de La Fayette's peculiarities she had found at times unendurable. Her listeners had followed her narration with the utmost intensity and absorption. When she stopped, their eyes met in a look of assenting comment.
"It was perfectly characteristic, all of it! She judged you, doubtless, by herself. She always seems to me, even now, to keep one eye on her comfort and the other on her purse!"
"Ah, dear duchesse, how keen you are!" laughingly acquiesced Madame de Sévigné, as with a shrug she accepted the verdict—her indignation melting with the shrug. "And how right! No woman ever drives better bargains, without moving a finger. From her invalid's chair she can conduct a dozen lawsuits. She spends half her existence in courting death; she caresses her maladies; she positively hugs them; but she can always be miraculously resuscitated at the word money!"
"Yes," added with a certain relish Madame de Kerman. "And this is the same woman who must be forever running away from Paris because she can no longer endure the exertion of talking, or of replying, or of listening; because she is wearied to extinction, as she herself admits, of saying good-morning and good-evening. She must hide herself in some pastoral retreat, where simply, as she says, 'to exist is enough;' where she can remain, as it were, miraculously suspended between heaven and earth!"
A ripple of amused laughter went round the little group; there was nothing these ladies enjoyed so keenly as a delicate dish of gossip, seasoned with wit, and stuffed with epigrams. This talk was exactly to their taste. The silence and seclusion of their surroundings were an added stimulus to confidence and to a freer interchange of opinions about their world. Paris and Versailles seemed so very far away; it would appear safe to say almost anything about one's dearest friends. There was nothing to remind them of the restraints of levees, or the penalty indiscretion must pay for folly breathed in that whispering gallery—the ruelle. It was indeed a delightful hour; altogether an ideal situation.
The fire had burned so low only a few embers were alive now, and the candles were beginning to flicker and droop in the sconces. But the three ladies refused to find the little room either cold or dark; their talk was not half done yet, and their muffs would keep them warm. The shadow of the deepening gloom they found delightfully provocative of confidences.
After a short pause, while Madame de Kerman busied herself with the tongs and the fagots, trying to reinvigorate the dying flames, the duchesse asked, in a somewhat more intimate tone than she had used yet:
"And the duke—do you really think she loved the Duke de La
Rochefoucauld?"
"She reformed him, dear duchesse; at least she always proclaims his reform as the justification of her love."
"You—you esteemed him yourself very highly, did you not?"
"Oh, I loved him tenderly; how could one help it? He was the best as well as the most brilliant of men! I never knew a tenderer heart; domestic joys and sorrows affected him in a way to render him incomparable. I have seen him weep over the death of his mother, who only died eight years before him, you know, with a depth of sincerity that made me adore him."
"He must in truth have been a very sincere person."
"Sincere!" cried Madame de Sévigné, her eyes flaming. "Had you but seen his deathbed! His bearing was sublime! Believe me, dear friend, it was not in vain that M. de La Rochefoucauld had written philosophic reflections all his life; he had already anticipated his last moments in such a way that there was nothing either new or strange in death when it came to him."
"Madame de La Fayette truly mourned him—don't you think so? You were with her a great deal, were you not, after his death?"
"I never left her. It was the most pitiable sight to see her in her loneliness and her misery. You see, their common ill-health and their sedentary habits, had made them so necessary to each other! It was, as it were, two souls in a single body. Nothing could exceed the confidence and charm of their friendship; it was incomparable. To Madame de La Fayette his loss came as her death-blow; life seems at an end for her; for where, indeed, can she find another such friend, or such intercourse, such sweetness and charm—such confidence and consideration?"
There was a moment's silence after Madame de Sévigné's eloquent outburst. The eyes of the three friends were lost for a moment in the twinkling flames. The duchesse and Madame de Kerman exchanged meaning glances.
"Since the duke's death her thoughts are more and more turned toward religion. I hear she has been fortunate in her choice of directors, has she not? Du Guet is said to be an ideal confessor for the authoress of 'La Princesse de Clèves.'" There was just a suspicion of malice in the duchesse's tones.
"Oh, he was born to take her in hand. He knew just when to speak with authority, and when to make use of the arts of persuasion. He wrote to her once, you remember: 'You, who have passed your life in dreaming—cease to dream! You, who have taken such pride unto yourself for being so true in all things, were very far, indeed, from the truth—you were only half true—falsely true. Your godless wisdom was in reality purely a matter of good taste!'"
"What audacity! Bossuet himself could not have put the truth more nakedly." The duchesse was one of those to whom truths were novelties, and unpleasant ones.
"Bossuet, if I remember rightly, was with the Duke de La Rochefoucauld at the last, was he not?"
"Yes," responded Madame de Sévigné; "he was with him; he administered the supreme unction. The duke was in a beautiful state of grace. M, Vinet, you remember, said of him that he died with 'perfect decorum.'"
"Speaking of dying reminds me"—cried suddenly Madame de Sévigné—"how are the duke's hangings getting on?"
"They begin, the duke writes me, to hang again to-morrow," answered the duchesse, with a certain air of disdain, the first appearance of this weapon of the great now coming to the grande dame's aid. Her husband, the Duke de Chaulnes' trouble with his revolutionary citizens at Rennes was a subject that never failed to arouse a feeling of angry contempt in her. It was too preposterous, the idea of those insolent creatures rising against him, their rightful duke and master!
The duchesse's feeling in the matter was fully shared by her friends. In all the court there was but one opinion in the matter—hanging was really far too good for the wretched creatures.
"Monsieur de Chaulnes," the duchesse went on, with ironical contempt in her voice, "still goes on punishing Rennes!"
"This province and the duke's treatment of it will serve as a capital example to all others. It will teach those rascals," Madame de Kerman continued, in lower tones, "to respect their governors, and not to throw stones into their gardens!"
"Fancy that—the audacity of throwing stones into their duke's garden! Why, did you know, they actually—those insolent creatures actually called him—called the duke—'gros cochon?'"
All three ladies gasped in horror at this unparalleled instance of audacity; they threw up their hands, as they groaned over the picture, in low tones of finished elegance.
"It is little wonder the duke hangs right and left! The dear duke—what a model governor! How I should like to have seen him sack that street at Rennes, with all the ridiculous old men, and the women in childbirth, and the children, turned out pêle-mêle! And the hanging, too—why, hanging now seems to me a positively refreshing performance!" And Madame de Sévigné laughed with unstinted gayety as at an excellent joke.
The picture of Rennes and the cruelty dealt its inhabitants was a pleasant picture, in the contemplation of which these ladies evidently found much delectation. They were quiet for a longer period of time than usual; they continued silent, as they looked into the fire, smiling; the flames there made them think of other flames as forms of merited punishment.
"A curious people those Bas Bretons," finally ejaculated Madame de Sévigné. "I never could understand how Bertrand Duguesclin made them the best soldiers of his day in France!"
"You know Lower Brittany very well, do you not, dear friend?"
"Not so well as the coast. Les Rochers is in Upper Brittany, you know. I know the south better still. Ah, what a charming journey I once took along the Loire with my friend Bien-Bon, the Abbé de Coulanges. We found it the most enchanting country in the world—the country of feasts and of famine; feasts for us and famine for the people. I remember we had to cross the river; our coach was placed on the barge, and we were rowed along by stout peasants. Through the glass windows of the coach we looked out at a series of changing pictures—the views were charming. We sat, of course, entirely at our ease, on our soft cushions. The country people, crowded together below, were—ugh!—like pigs in straw."
"Was Bien-Bon with you when you made that little excursion to St.
Germain?" queried the duchesse.
"Ah, that was a gay night," joyously responded Madame de Sévigné. "How well we amused ourselves on that little visit that we paid Madame de Maintenon—when she was only Madame Scarron."
"Was she so handsome then as they say she was—at that time?"
"Very handsome; she was good, too, and amiable, and easy to talk to; one talked well and readily with her. She was then only the governess of the king's bastards, you know—of the children he had had by Madame de Montespan. That was the first step toward governing the king. Well, one night—the night to which you refer—I remember we were all supping with Madame de La Fayette. We had been talking endlessly! Suddenly it occurred to us it would be a most amusing adventure to take Madame Scarron home, to the very last end of the Faubourg Saint Germain, far beyond where Madame de La Fayette lived—near Vaugirard, out into the Bois, in the country. The Abbé came too. It was midnight when we started. The house, when at last we reached it, we found large and beautiful, with large and fine rooms and a beautiful garden; for Madame Scarron, as governess of the king's children, had a coach and a lot of servants and horses. She herself dressed then modestly and yet magnificently, as a woman should, who spent her life among people of the highest rank. We had a merry outing, returning in high spirits, blessed in having no end of lanterns, and thus assured against robbers."
"She and Madame de La Fayette were very close friends, I remember, during that time," mused the duchesse, "when they were such near neighbors."
"Yes," Madame de Sévigné went on, as unwearied now, although it was nearly midnight, as in the beginning of the long evening. "Yes; I always thought Madame de Maintenon's satirical little joke about Madame de La Fayette's bed festooned with gold—'I might have fifty thousand pounds income, and never should I live in the style of a great lady; never should I have a bed festooned with gold like Madame de La Fayette'—was the beginning of their rupture."
"All the same, Madame de La Fayette, lying on that bed, beneath the gold hangings, was a much more simple person than ever was Madame de Maintenon!"
"Your speaking of bed reminds me, dear ladies ours must be quite cold by this time. How we have chatted! What a delightful gossip! But we must not forget that our journey to-morrow is to be a long one!"
The duchesse rose, the other two ladies rising instantly, observing, in spite of the intimate relations in which they stood toward the duchesse, the deference due to her more exalted rank. The latter clapped her hands; outside the door a shuffling and a low groan were heard—the groan came from the sleepy lackey, roused from his deep slumber, as he uncoiled himself from the close knot into which his legs and body were knit in the curve of the narrow stairs.
The ladies, a few seconds later, were wending their way up the steep turret steps. They were preceded by torches and followed by quite a long train of maids and lackeys. For a long hour, at least, the little inn resounded with the sound of hurrying feet, of doors closing and shutting; with the echo of voices giving commands and of others purring in sleepy accents of obedience. Then one by one the sounds died away; the lights went out in the bedchambers; faint flickerings stole through the chinks of doors and windows. The watchman cried out the hour, and the gleam of a lantern flashed here and there, illuminating the open court-yard. The cocks crowed shrilly into the night air. A halberdier turned in his sleep where he lay, on some straw beneath the coach-shed, his halberd rattling as it struck the cobbles. And over the whole—over the gentle slumber of the great ladies and the sleep of beast and man—there fell the peace and the stillness of the midnight—of that midnight of long ago.
[Illustration: CHAMBRE DE LA PUCELLE—DIVES]
CHAPTER XXII.
A NINETEENTH-CENTURY BREAKFAST.
The very next morning, after the rain, and the vision I had had of Madame de Sévigné, conjured up by my surroundings and the reading of her letters, Monsieur Paul paid us an early call. He came to beg the loan of our sitting-room, he said. He had had a despatch from a coaching-party from Trouville; they were to arrive for breakfast. The whip and owner of the coach was a great friend of his, he proffered by way of explanation—a certain count who had a genius for friendship—one who also had an artist's talent for admiring the beautiful. He was among those who were in a state of perpetual adoration before the inn's perfections. He made yearly pilgrimages from his chateau above Rouen to eat a noon breakfast in the Chambre des Marmousets. Now, a breakfast served elsewhere than in this chamber would be, from his point of view, to have journeyed to a shrine to find the niche empty. The gift that was begged of us, therefore, was the loan for a few hours of the famous little room.
In less than a half hour we were watching the entrance of the coach by the side of Madame Le Mois. We were all three seated on the green bench.
Faintly at first, and presently gaining in distinctness, came the fall of horses' hoofs and the rumble of wheels along the highway. A little cavalcade was soon passing beneath the archway. First there dashed in two horsemen, who had sprung to the ground almost as soon as their steeds' hoofs struck the paved court-yard. Then there swept by a jaunty dog cart, driven by a mannish figure radiantly robed in white. Swiftly following came the dash and jingle of four coach-horses, bathed in sweat, rolling the vehicle into the court as if its weight were a thing of air. All save one among the gay party seated on the high seats, were too busy with themselves and their chatter, to take heed of their surroundings. A lady beneath her deep parasol was busily engaged in a gay traffic of talk with the groups of men peopling the back seats of the coach. One of the men, however, was craning his neck beyond the heads of his companions; he was running his eye rapidly up and down the long inn facade. Finally his glance rested on us; and then, with a rush, a deep red mounted the man's cheek, as he tore off his derby to wave it, as if in a triumph of discovery. Renard had been true to his promise. He had come to see his friends and to test the famous Sauterne. He flung himself down from his lofty perch to take his seat, entirely as a matter of course, beside us on the green bench.
"What luck, hey?—greatest luck in the world, finding you in, like this. I've been in no end of a tremble, fearing you'd gone to Caen, or Falaise, or somewhere, and that I shouldn't see you after all. Well, how are you? How goes it? What do you think of old Dives and Monsieur Paul, and the rest of it? I see you're settled; you took the palace chamber. Trust American women—they know the best, and get it."
"But these people, who are they, and how did you—?" We were unfeignedly glad to see him, but curiosity is a passion not to be trifled with—after a month in the provinces.
"Oh—the De Troisacs? Old friends of mine—known them years. Jolly lot. Charming fellow, De Troisac—only good Frenchman I've ever known. They're just off their yacht; saw them all yesterday at the Trouville Casino. Said they were running down here for breakfast to-day, asked me, and I came, of course." He laughed as he added: "I said I should come, you remember, to get some of that Sauterne. A man will go any distance for a good bottle of wine, you know."
Meanwhile, in the court-yard, the party on the coach, by means of ladders and the helping of the grooms, were scrambling down from their seats. Renard's friend, the Comte de Troisac, was easily picked out from the group of men. He was the elder of the party—stoutish, with frank eyes and a smiling mouth; he was bustling about from the gaunt grooms to the ladder, and from ladder to the coach-seat, giving his commands right and left, and executing most of them himself. A tall, slim woman, with drooping eyelids, and an air of extreme elegance and of cultivated fatigue, was also easily recognizable as the countess. It took two grooms, two of the gentlemen guests, and her husband to assist her to the ground. Her passage down the steps of the ladder had been long enough, however, to enable her to display a series of pretty poses, each one more effective than the others. When one has an instep of ideal elevation, what is the use of being born a Frenchwoman, unless one knows how to make use of opportunity?
From the dog-cart, that had rattled in across the cobbles with a dash and a spurt, there came quite a different accent and pose. The whitish personage, whom we had mistakenly supposed to be a man, wore petticoats; the male attire only held as far as the waist of the lady. The stiff white shirt-front, the knotted tie—a faultless male knot—the loose driving-jacket, with its sprig of white geranium, and the round straw-hat worn in mannish fashion, close to the level brows, was a costume that would have deceived either sex. Below the jacket flowed the straight lines of a straight skirt, that no further conjectures should be rendered necessary. This lady had a highbred air of singular distinction, accentuated by a tremendously knowing look. She was at once elegant and rakish; the gamin in her was obviously the touch of caviare to season the woman of fashion. The mixture made an extraordinarily attractive ensemble. As she jumped to the ground, throwing her reins to a groom, her jump was a master-stroke; it landed her squarely on her feet; even as she struck the ground her hands were thrust deeply into her pockets. The man seated beside her, who now leaped out after her, seemed timid and awkward by contrast with her alert precision. This couple moved at once toward the bench on which madame was seated. With the coming in of the coach and the cart she had risen, waddling forward to meet the party. Monsieur Paul was at the coach-wheels before the grooms had shot themselves down; De Troisac, with eager friendliness, stretched forth a hand from the top of his seat, exclaiming, with gay heartiness, "Ah, mon bon—comment ça va?"
The mere was as eagerly greeted. Even the countess dismissed her indifference for the moment, as she held out her hand to Madame Le Mois.
"Dear Madame Le Mois—and it goes well with you? And the gout and the rheumatism, they have ceased to torment you? Quelle bonne nouvelle! And here are the dear old cocks and the wounded bantam. The cockatoos—ah, there they are, still swinging in the air! Comme c'est joli—et frais—et que ça sent bon!"
Madame and Monsieur Paul were equally effusive in their inquiries and exclamations—it was clearly a meeting of old friends. Madame Le Mois' face was meanwhile a study. The huge surface was glistening with pleasure; she was unfeignedly glad to see these Parisians:—but there was no elation at this meeting on such easy terms with greatness. Her shrewdness was as alive as ever; she was about to make money out of the visit—they were to have of her best, but they must pay for it. Between her rapid fire of questionings as to the countess's health and the history of her travels, there was as rapid a shower of commands, sometimes shouted out, above all the hubbub, to the cooks standing gaping in the kitchen doorway, or whispered hoarsely to Ernestine and Marianne, who were flying about like wild pigeons, a little drunk with the novelty of this first breakfast of the season.
"Allons, mon enfant—cours—cours—get thy linen, my child, and the silver candélabres. It is to be laid in the Marmousets, thou knowest. Paul will come presently. And the salads, pluck them and bring them in to me—cours—cours."
The great world was all very well, and it was well to be on friendly, even intimate terms, with it; but, Dieu! one's own bread is of importance too! And the countess, for all her delicacy, was a bonne fourchette.
The countess and her friend, after a moment of standing in the court-yard, of patting the pelican, of trying their blandishments on the flamingo, of catching up the bantam, and filling the air with their purring, and caressing, and incessant chatter, passed beneath the low door to the inner sanctum of madame. The two ladies were clearly bent on a few moments of unreserved gossip and that repairing of the toilet which is a religious act to women of fashion the world over.
In the court-yard the scene was still a brilliant one. The gayly painted coach was now deserted. It stood, a chariot of state, as it were, awaiting royalty; its yellow sides gleamed like topaz in the sun. The grooms were unharnessing the leaders, that were still bathed in the white of their sweat. The count's dove-colored flannels were a soft mass against the snow of the chef's apron and cap; the two were in deep consultation at the kitchen door. Monsieur Paul was showing, with all the absorption of the artist, his latest Jumièges carvings to the taller, more awkward of the gentlemen, to the one driven in by the mannish beauty.
The cockatoos had not ceased shrieking from the very beginning of the hubbub; nor had the squirrels stopped running along the bars of their cage, a-flutter with excitement. The peacocks trailed their trains between the coach-wheels, announcing, squawkingly, their delight at the advent of a larger audience. Above the cries of the fowls and the shrieks of the cocks, the chatter of human tongues, the subdued murmur of the ladies' voices coming through the open lattice, and the stamp of horses' hoofs, there swept above it all the light June breeze, rustling in the vines, shaking the thick branches against the wooden facades.
The two ladies soon made their appearance in the sunlit court-yard. The murmur of their talk and their laughter reached us, along with the froufrou of their silken petticoats.
"You were not bored, chère enfant, driving Monsieur d'Agreste all that long distance?"
The countess was smiling tenderly into her companion's face. She had stopped her to readjust the geranium sprig that was drooping in her friend's cover-coat. The smile was the smile of a sympathizing angel, but what a touch of hidden malice there was in the notes of her caressing voice! As she repinned the boutonnière, she gave the dancing eyes, that were brimming with the mirth of the coming retort, the searching inquest of her glance.
"Bored! Dieu, que non!" The black little beauty threw back her throat, laughing, as she rolled her great eyes. "Bored—with all the tricks I was playing? Fernande! pity me, there was such a little time, and so much to do!"
"So little time—only fourteen kilos!" The countess compressed her lips; they were smiling no longer.
"Ah, but you see, I had so much to combat. You had a whole season, last summer, in which to play your game, your solemn game." Here the gay young widow rippled forth a pearly scale of treble laughter. "And I have had only a week, thus far!"
"Yes, but what time you make!"
And this time both ladies laughed, although, still, only one laughed well.
"Ah! those women—how they love each other," commented Renard, as he sat on the bench, swinging his legs, with his eyes following the two vanishing figures. "Only women who are intimate—Parisian intimates—can cut to the bone like that, with a surgeon's dexterity."
He explained then that the handsome brunette was a widow, a certain Baronne d'Autun, noted for her hunting and her conquests; the last on the latter list was Monsieur d'Agreste, a former admirer of the countess; he was somewhat famous as a scientist and socialist, so good a socialist as to refuse to wear his title of duke. The other two gentlemen of the party, who had joined them now, the two horsemen, were the Comtes de Mirant and de Fonbriant. These latter were two typical young swells of the Jockey Club model; their vacant, well-bred faces wore the correct degree of fashionable pallor, and their manners appeared to be also as perfect as their glances were insolent.
Into these vacant faces the languid countess was breathing the inspiration of her smile. Enigmatic as was the latter, it was as simple as an infant's compared to the occult character of her glance. A wealth of complexities lay enfolded in the deep eyes, rimmed with their mystic darkened circlet—that circle in which the Parisienne frames her experience, and through which she pleads to have it enlarged!
A Frenchwoman and cosmetics! Is there any other combination on this round earth more suggestive of the comedy of high life, of its elegance and of its perfidy, of its finish and of its emptiness?
The men of the party wore costumes perilously suggestive of Opera Bouffe models. Their fingers were richly begemmed; their watch-chains were laden with seals and charms. Any one of the costumes was such as might have been chosen by a tenor in which to warble effectively to a soubrette on the boards of a provincial theatre; and it was worn by these fops of the Jockey Club with the air of its being the last word in nautical fashions. Better than their costumes were their voices; for what speech from human lips pearls itself off with such crispness and finish as the delicate French idiom from a Parisian tongue?
I never quite knew how it came about that we were added to this gay party of breakfasters. We found ourselves, however, after a high skirmish of preliminary presentations, among the number to take our places at the table.
In the Chambre des Marmousets, Monsieur Paul, we found, had set the feast with the taste of an artist and the science of an archaeologist. The table itself was long and narrow, a genuine fifteenth century table. Down the centre ran a strip of antique altar-lace; the sides were left bare, that the lustre of the dark wood might be seen. In the centre was a deep old Caen bowl, with grapes and fuchsias to make a mound of soft color. A pair of seventeenth-century candélabres twisted and coiled their silver branches about their rich repoussé columns; here and there on the yellow strip of lace were laid bunches of June roses, those only of the rarer and older varieties having been chosen, and each was tied with a Louis XV love-knot. Monsieur Paul was himself an omniscient figure at the feast; he was by turns officiating as butler, carving, or serving from the side-tables; or he was crossing the court-yard with his careful, catlike tread, a bottle under each arm. He was also constantly appealed to by Monsieur d'Agreste or the count, to settle a dispute about the age of the china, or the original home of the various old chests scattered about the room.
"Paul, your stained glass shows up well in this light," the count called out, wiping his mustache over his soup-plate.
"Yes," answered Monsieur Paul, as he went on serving the sherry, pausing for a moment at the count's glass. "They always look well in full sunlight. It was a piece of pure luck, getting them. One can always count on getting hold of tapestries and carvings, but old glass is as rare as—"
"A pretty woman," interpolated the gay young widow, with the air of a connoisseur.
"Outside of Paris—you should have added," gallantly contributed the count. Everyone went on eating after the light laughter had died away.
The countess had not assisted at this brief conversation; she was devoting her attention to receiving the devotion of the two young counts; one was on either side of her, and both gave every outward and visible sign of wearing her chains, and of wearing them with insistance. The real contest between them appeared to be, not so much which should make the conquest of the languid countess, as which should outflank the other in his compromising demeanor. The countess, beneath her drooping lids, watched them with the indulgent indolence of a lioness, too luxuriously lazy to spring.
The countess, clearly, was not made for sunlight. In the courtyard her face had seemed chiefly remarkable as a triumph of cosmetic treatment; here, under this rich glow, the purity and delicacy of the features easily placed her among the beauties of the Parisian world. Her eyes, now that the languor of the lids was disappearing with the advent of the wines, were magnificent; her use of them was an open avowal of her own knowledge of their splendor. The young widow across the table was also using her eyes, but in a very different fashion. She had now taken off her straw hat; the curly crop of a brown mane gave the brilliant face an added accent of vigor. The chien de race was the dominant note now in the muscular, supple body, the keen-edged nostrils, and the intent gaze of the liquid eyes. These latter were fixed with the fixity of a savage on Charm. She was giving, in a sweet sibilant murmur, the man seated next her—Monsieur d'Agreste, the man who refused to bear his title—her views of the girl.
"Those Americans, the Americans of the best type, are a race apart, I tell you; we have nothing like them; we condemn them because we don't understand them. They understand us—they read us—"
"Oh, they read our books—the worst of them."
"Yes, but they read the best too; and the worst don't seem to hurt them. I'll warrant that Mees Gay—that is her name, is it not?—has read Zola, for instance; and yet, see how simple and innocent—yes—innocent, she looks."
"Yes, the innocence of experience—which knows how to hide," said
Monsieur d'Agreste, with a slight shrug.
"Mees Gay!" the countess cried out across the table, suddenly waking from her somnolence; she had overheard the baroness in spite of the low tone in which the dialogue had been carried on; her voice was so mellifluously sweet, one instinctively scented a touch of hidden poison in it—"Mees Gay, there is a question being put at this side of the table you alone can answer. Pray pardon the impertinence of a personal question—but we hear that American young ladies read Zola; is it true?"
"I am afraid that we do read him," was Charm's frank answer. "I have read him—but my reading is all in the past tense now."
"Ah—you found him too highly seasoned?" one of the young counts asked, eagerly, with his nose in the air, as if scenting an indiscretion.
"No, I did not go far enough to get a taste of his horrors; I stopped at his first period."
"And what do you call his first period, dear mademoiselle?" The countess's voice was still freighted with honey. Her husband coughed and gave her a warning glance, and Renard was moving uneasily in his chair.
"Oh," Charm answered lightly, "his best period—when he didn't sell."
Everyone laughed. The little widow cried beneath her breath:
"Elle a de l'esprit, celle-là—-"
"Elle en a de trop," retorted the countess.
"Did you ever read Zola's 'Quatre Saisons?'" Renard asked, turning to the count, at the other end of the table.
No, the count had not read it—but he could read the story of a beautiful nature when he encountered one, and presently he allowed Charm to see how absorbing he found its perusal.
"Ah, bien—et tout de même—Zola, yes, he writes terrible books; but he is a good man—a model husband and father," continued Monsieur d'Agreste, addressing the table.
"And Daudet—he adores his wife and children," added the count, as if with a determination to find only goodness in the world.
"I wonder how posterity will treat them? They'll judge their lives by their books, I presume."
"Yes, as we judge Rabelais or Voltaire—"
"Or the English Shakespeare by his 'Hamlet.'"
"Ah! what would not Voltaire have done with Hamlet!" The countess was beginning to wake again.
"And Molière? What of his 'Misanthrope?' There is a finished, a human, a possible Hamlet! a Hamlet with flesh and blood," cried out the younger count on her right. "Even Mounet-Sully could do nothing with the English Hamlet."
"Ah, well, Mounet-Sully did all that was possible with the part. He made Hamlet at least a lover!"
"Ah, love! as if, even on the stage, one believed in that absurdity any longer!" was the countess's malicious comment.
"Then, if you have ceased to believe in love, why did you go so religiously to Monsieur Caro's lectures?" cried the baroness.
"Oh, that dear Caro! He treated the passions so delicately, he handled them as if they were curiosities. One went to hear his lecture on Love as one might go to hear a treatise on the peculiarities of an extinct species," was the countess's quiet rejoinder.
"One should believe in love, if only to prove one's unbelief in it," murmured the young count on her left.
"Ah, my dear comte, love, nowadays, like nature, should only be used for decoration, as a bit of stage setting, or as stage scenery."
"A moonlight night can be made endurable, sometimes," whispered the count.
"A clair de lune that ends in lune de miel, that is the true use to which to put the charms of Diana." It was Monsieur d'Agreste's turn now to murmur in the baroness's ear.
"Oh, honey, it becomes so cloying in time," interpolated the countess, who had overheard; she overheard everything. She gave a wearied glance at her husband, who was still talking vigorously to Charm and Renard. She went on softly: "It's like trying to do good. All goodness, even one's own, bores one in the end. At Basniège, for example, lovely as it is, ideally feudal, and with all its towers as erect as you please, I find this modern virtue, this craze for charity, as tiresome as all the rest of it. Once you've seen that all the old women have woollen stockings, and that each cottage has fagots enough for the winter, and your role of benefactress is at an end. In Paris, at least, charity is sometimes picturesque; poverty there is tainted with vice. If one believed in anything, it might be worth while to begin a mission; but as it is—"
"The gospel of life, according to you, dear comtesse, is that in modern life there is no real excitement except in studying the very best way to be rid of it," cried out Renard, from the bottom of the table.
"True; but suicide is such a coarse weapon," the lady answered, quite seriously; "so vulgar now, since the common people have begun to use it. Besides, it puts your adversary, the world, in possession of your secret of discontent. No, no. Suicide, the invention of the nineteenth century, goes out with it. The only refined form of suicide is to bore one's self to death," and she smiled sweetly into the young man's eyes nearest her.
"Ah, comtesse, you should not have parted so early in life with all your illusions," was Monsieur d'Agreste's protest across the table.
"And, Monsieur d'Agreste, it isn't given to us all to go to the ends of the earth, as you do, in search of new ones! This friction of living doesn't wear on you as it does on the rest of us."
"Ah, the ends of the earth, they are very much like the middle and the beginning of things. Man is not so very different, wherever you find him. The only real difference lies in the manner of approaching him. The scientist, for example, finds him eternally fresh, novel, inspiring; he is a mine only as yet half-worked." Monsieur d'Agreste was beginning to wake up; his eyes, hitherto, alone had been alive; his hands had been busy, crunching his bread; but his tongue had been silent.
"Ah—h science! Science is only another anaesthetic—it merely helps to kill time. It is a hobby, like any other," was the countess's rejoinder.
"Perhaps," courteously returned Monsieur d'Agreste, with perfect sweetness of temper. "But at least, it is a hobby that kills no one else. And if of a hobby you can make a principle—"
"A principle?" The countess contracted her brows, as if she had heard a word that did not please her.
"Yes, dear lady; the wise man lays out his life as a gardener does a garden, on the principle of selection, of order, and with a view to the succession of the seasons. You all bemoan the dulness of life; you, in Paris, the torpor of ennui stifles you, you cry. On the contrary, I would wish the days were weeks, and the weeks months. And why? Simply because I have discovered the philosopher's stone. I have grasped the secret of my era. The comedy of rank is played out; the life of the trifler is at an end; all that went out with the Bourbons. Individualism is the new order. To-day a man exists simply by virtue of his own effort—he stands on his own feet. It is the era of the republican, of the individual—science is the true republic. For us who are displaced from the elevation our rank gave us, work is the watchword, and it is the only battle-cry left us now. He only is strong, and therefore happy, who perceives this truth, and who marches in step with the modern movement."
The serious turn given to the conversation had silenced all save the baroness. She had listened even more intently than the others to her friend's eloquence, nodding her head assentingly to all that he said. His philosophic reflections produced as much effect on her vivacious excitability as they might on a restless Skye-terrier.
"Yes, yes—he's entirely right, is Monsieur d'Agreste; he has got to the bottom of things. One must keep in step with modernity—one must be fin de siècle. Comtesse, you should hunt; there is nothing like a fox or a boar to make life worth living. It's better, infinitely better, than a pursuit of hearts; a boar's more troublesome than a man."
"Unless you marry him," the countess interrupted, ending with a thrush-like laugh. When she laughed she seemed to have a bird in her throat.
"Oh, a man's heart, it's like the flag of a defenceless country—anyone may capture it."
The countess smiled with ineffable grace into the vacant, amorous-eyed faces on either side of her, rising as she smiled. We had reached dessert now; the coffee was being handed round. Everyone rose; but the countess made no move to pass out from the room. Both she and the baroness took from their pockets dainty cigarette-cases.
"Vous permettez?" asked the baroness, leaning over coquettishly to Monsieur d'Agreste's cigar. She accompanied her action with a charming glance, one in which all the woman in her was uppermost, and one which made Monsieur d'Agreste's pale cheeks flush like a boy's. He was a philosopher and a scientist; but all his science and philosophy had not saved him from the barbed shafts of a certain mischievous little god. He, also, was visibly hugging his chains.
The party had settled themselves in the low divans and in the Henri IV arm-chairs; a few here and there remained, still grouped about the table, with the freedom of pose and in the comfort of attitude smoking and coffee bring with them.
It was destined, however, that the hour was to be a short one. One of the grooms obsequiously knocked at the door; he whispered in the count's ear, who advanced quickly toward him, the news that the coach was waiting; one of the leaders.
"Desolated, my dear ladies—but my man tells me the coach is in readiness, and I have an impertinent leader who refuses to stand, when he is waiting, on anything more solid than his hind legs. Fernande, my dear, we must be on the move. Desolated, dear ladies—desolated—but it's only au revoir. We must arrange a meeting later, in Paris—"
The scene in the court-yard was once again gay with life and bristling with color. The coach and the dog-cart shone resplendent in the slanting sun's rays. In the brighter sunlight, the added glow in the eyes and the cheeks of the brilliantly costumed group, made both men and women seem younger and fresher than when they had appeared, two hours since. All were in high good humor—the wines and the talk had warmed the quick French blood. There was a merry scramble for the top coach-seats; the two young counts exchanged their seat in their saddles for the privilege of holding, one the countess's vinaigrette, and the other, her long-handled parasol. Renard was beside his friend De Troisac; the horn rang out, the horses started as if stung, dashing at their bits, and in another moment the great coach was being whirled beneath the archway.
"Au revoir—au revoir!" was cried down to us from the throne-like elevation. There was a pretty waving of hands—for even the countess's dislike melted into sweetness as she bade us farewell. There were answering cries from the shrieking cockatoos, from the peacocks who trailed their tails sadly in the dust, from the cooks and the peasant serving-women who had assembled to bid the distinguished guests adieu. There was also a sweeping bow from Monsieur Paul, and a grunt of contented dismissal from Madame Le Mois.
A moment after the departure of the coach the court yard was as still as a convent cloister.
It was still enough to hear the click of madame's fingers, as she tapped her snuff-box.
"The count doesn't see any better than he did—toujours myope, lui" the old woman murmured to her son, with a pregnant wink, as she took her snuff.
"C'est sa façon de tout voir, au contraire, ma mère," significantly returned Monsieur Paul, with his knowing smile.
The mother's shrug answered the smile, as both mother and son walked in different directions—across the sunlit court.