that the water should not boil, had prevailed, as the half-soaked tea- leaves floating on top of our full cups triumphantly proclaimed.
We sipped the beverage, agreeing Balzac had well named it _ce boisson fade et melancolique_; the novelist’s disdain being the better understood as we reflected he had doubtless only tasted it as concocted by French ineptitude. We were very merry over the liver-colored liquid, as we sipped it and quoted Balzac. But not for a moment had our merriment deceived the brown eyes and the fluttering cap-ribbons. A little drama of remorse was soon played for our benefit. It was she, her very self, the cap protested–as she pointed a tragic finger at the swelling, rounded line of her firm bodice–it was she who had insisted that the water should _not_ boil; there had been ladies–_des vraies anglaises_–here, only last summer, who would not that the water should boil, when their tea was made. And now, it appears that they were wrong, “_c’etait probablement une fantaisie de la part de ces dames_.” Would we wait for another cup? It would take but an instant, it was a little mistake, so easy to remedy. But this mistake, like many another, like crime, for instance, could never be remedied, we smilingly told her; a smile that changed her solicitous remorse to a humorist’s view of the situation.
Another humorist, one accustomed to view the world from heights known as trapeze elevations, we met a little later on our way out of the narrow upper streets; he was also looking down over Trouville. It was a motley figure in a Pierrot garb, with a smaller striped body, both in the stage pallor of their trade. These were somewhat startling objects to confront on a Normandy high-road. For clowns, however, taken by surprise, they were astonishingly civil. They passed their “_bonjour_” to us and to the coachman as glibly as though accosting us from the commoner circus distance.
“They have come to taste of the fresh air, they have,” laconically remarked our driver, as his round Norman eyes ran over the muscled bodies of the two athletes. “I had a brother who was one–I had; he was a famous one–he was; he broke his neck once, when the net had been forgotten. They all do it–_ils se cassent le cou tous, tot ou tard! Allons toi t’as peur, toi?_” Chat noir’s great back was quivering with fear; he had no taste, himself, for shapes like these, spectral and wan as ghosts, walking about in the sun. He took us as far away as possible, and as quickly, from these reminders of the thing men call pleasure.
We, meanwhile, were asking Pierre for a certain promised chateau, one famous for its beauty, between Trouville and Cabourg.
“It is here, madame–the chateau,” he said, at last.
Two lions couchant, seated on wide pedestals beneath a company of noble trees, were the only visible inhabitants of the dwelling. There was a sweep of gardens: terraces that picked their way daintily down the cliffs toward the sea, a mansard roof that covered a large mansion–these were the sole aspects of chateau life to keep the trees company. In spite of Pierre’s urgent insistence that the view was even more beautiful than the one from the hill, we refused to exchange our first experiences of the beauty of the prospect for a second which would be certain to invite criticism; for it is ever the critic in us that plays the part of Bluebeard to our many-wived illusions.
We passed between the hedgerows with not even a sigh of regret. We were presently rewarded by something better than an illusion–by reality, which, at its best, can afford to laugh at the spectral shadow of itself. Near the chateau there lived on, the remnant of a hamlet. It was a hamlet, apparently, that boasted only one farm-house; and the farm-house could show but a single hayrick. Beneath the sloping roof, modelled into shape by a pitchfork and whose symmetrical lines put Mansard’s clumsy creation yonder to the blush, sat an old couple–a man and a woman. Both were old, with the rounded backs of the laborer; the woman’s hand was lying in the man’s open palm, while his free arm was clasped about her neck with all the tenderness of young love. Both of the old heads were laid back on the pillow made by the freshly-piled grasses. They had done a long day’s work already, before the sun had reached its meridian; they were weary and resting here before they went back to their toil.
This was better than the view; it made life seem finer than nature; how rich these two poor old things looked, with only their poverty about them!
Meanwhile Pierre had quickly changed the rural _mise-en-scene_; instead of pink hawthorn hedges we were in the midst of young forest trees. Why is it that a forest is always a surprise in France? Is it that we have such a respect for French thrift, that a real forest seems a waste of timber? There are forests and forests; this one seemed almost a stripling in its tentative delicacy, compared to the mature splendor of Fontainebleau, for example. This forest had the virility of a young savage; it was neither dense nor vast; yet, in contrast to the ribbony grain fields, and to the finish of the villa parks, was as refreshing to the eye as the right chord that strikes upon the ear after a succession of trills.
In all this fair Normandy sea-coast, with its wonderful inland contrasts, there was but one disappointing note. One looked in vain for the old Normandy costumes. The blouse and the close white cap–this is all that is left of the wondrous headgear, the short brilliant petticoats, the embroidered stomacher, and the Caen and Rouen jewels, abroad in the fields only a decade ago.
Pierre shrugged his shoulders when asked a question concerning these now pre-historic costumes.
“Ah! mademoiselle, you must see for yourself, that the peasant who doesn’t despise himself dresses now in the fields as he would in Paris.”
As if in confirmation of Pierre’s news of the fashions, there stepped forth from an avenue of trees, fringing a near farm-house, a wedding- party. The bride was in the traditional white of brides; the little cortege following the trail of her white gown, was dressed in costumes modelled on Bon Marche styles. The coarse peasant faces flamed from bonnets more flowery than the fields into which they were passing. The men seemed choked in their high collars; the agony of new boots was written on faces not used to concealing such form of torture. Even the groom was suffering; his bliss was something the gay little bride hanging on his arm must take entirely for granted. It was enough greatness for the moment to wear broadcloth and a white vest in the face of men.
“_Laissez, laissez, Marguerite_, it is clean here; it will look fine on the green!” cried the bride to an improvised train-bearer, who had been holding up the white alpaca. Then the full splendor of the bridal skirt trailed across the freshly mown grasses. An irrepressible murmur of admiration welled up from the wedding guests; even Pierre made part of the chorus. The bridegroom stopped to mop his face, and to look forth proudly, through starting eyeballs, on the splendor of his possessions.
“Ah! Lizette, thou art pretty like that, thou knowest. _Faut l’embrasser, tu sais_.”
He gave her a kiss full on the lips. The little bride returned the kiss with unabashed fervor. Then she burst into a loud fit of laughter.
“How silly you look, Jean, with your collar burst open.”
The groom’s enthusiasm had been too much for his toilet; the noon sun and the excitements of the marriage service had dealt hardly with his celluloid fastenings. All the wedding cortege rushed to the rescue. Pins, shouts of advice, pieces of twine, rubber fastenings, even knives, were offered to the now exploding bridegroom; everyone was helping him repair the ravages of his moment of bliss; everyone excepting the bride. She sat down upon her train and wept from pure rapture of laughter.
Pierre shook his head gravely, as he whipped up his steed.
“Jean will repent it; he’ll lose worse things than a button, with Lizette. A woman who laughs like that on the threshold of marriage will cry before the cradle is rocked, and will make others weep. However, Jean won’t be thinking of that–to-night.”
“Where are they going–along the highroad?”
“Only a short distance. They turn in there,” and he pointed with his whip to a near lane; “they go to the farm-house now–for the wedding dinner. Ah! there’ll be some heavy heads to-morrow. For you know, a Norman peasant only really eats and drinks well twice in his life–when he marries himself and when his daughter marries. Lizette’s father is rich–the meat and the wines will be good to-night.”
Our coachman sighed, as if the thought of the excellence of the coming banquet had disturbed his own digestion.
CHAPTER XV.
GUILLAUME-LE-CONQUERANT.
The wedding party was lost in a thicket. Pierre gave his whip so resounding a snap, it was no surprise to find ourselves rolling over the cobbles of a village street.
“This is Dives, mesdames, this is the inn!”
Pierre drew up, as he spoke, before a long, low facade.
Now, no one, I take it, in this world enjoys being duped. Surely disappointment is only a civil term for the varying degrees of fraud practised on the imagination. This inn, apparently, was to be classed among such frauds. It did not in the least, externally at least, fulfil Renard’s promises. He had told us to expect the marvellous and the mediaeval in their most approved period. Yet here we were, facing a featureless exterior! The facade was built yesterday–that was writ large, all over the low, rambling structure. One end, it is true, had a gabled end; there was also an old shrine niched in glass beneath the gable, and a low Norman gateway with rude letters carved over the arch. June was in its glory, and the barrenness of the commonplace structure was mercifully hidden by a wreath of pink and amber roses. But one scarcely drives twenty miles in the sun to look upon a facade of roses!
Chat noir, meanwhile, was becoming restless. Pierre had managed to keep his own patience well in hand. Now, however, he broke forth:
“Shall we enter, my ladies?”
Pierre drove us straight into paradise; for here, at last, within the courtyard, was the inn we had come to seek.
A group of low-gabled buildings surrounded an open court. All of the buildings were timbered, the diagonal beams of oak so old they were black in the sun, and the snowy whiteness of fresh plaster made them seem blacker still. The gabled roofs were of varying tones and tints; some were red, some mossy green, some as gray as the skin of a mouse; all were deeply, plentifully furrowed with the washings of countless rains, and they were bearded with moss. There were outside galleries, beginning somewhere and ending anywhere. There were open and covered outer stairways so laden with vines they could scarce totter to the low heights of the chamber doors on which they opened; and there were open sheds where huge farm-wagons were rolled close to the most modern of Parisian dog-carts. That not a note of contrast might be lacking, across the courtyard, in one of the windows beneath a stairway, there flashed the gleam of some rich stained glass, spots of color that were repeated, with quite a different lustre, in the dappled haunches of rows of sturdy Percherons munching their meal in the adjacent stalls. Add to such an ensemble a vagrant multitude of rose, honeysuckle, clematis, and wistaria vines, all blooming in full rivalry of perfume and color; insert in some of the corners and beneath some of the older casements archaic bits of sculpture–strange barbaric features with beards of Assyrian correctness and forms clad in the rigid draperies of the early Jumieges period of the sculptor’s art; lance above the roof ridges the quaint polychrome finials of the earlier Palissy models; and crowd the rough cobble-paved courtyard with a rare and distinguished assemblage of flamingoes, peacocks, herons, cockatoos swinging from gabled windows, and game-cocks that strut about in company with pink doves–and you have the famous inn of Guillaume le Conquerant!
Meanwhile an individual, with fine deep-gray eyes, and a face grave, yet kindly, over which a smile was humorously breaking, was patiently waiting at our carriage door. He could be no other than Monsieur Paul, owner and inn-keeper, also artist, sculptor, carver, restorer, to whom, in truth, this miracle of an inn owed its present perfection and picturesqueness.
“We have been long expecting you, mesdames,” Monsieur Paul’s grave voice was saying. “Monsieur Renard had written to announce your coming. You took the trouble to drive along the coast this fine day? It is idyllically lovely, is it not–under such a sun?”
Evidently the moment of enchantment was not to be broken by the worker of the spell. Monsieur Paul and his inn were one; if one was a poem the other was a poet. The poet was also lined with the man of the practical moment. He had quickly summoned a host of serving-people to take charge of us and our luggage.
“Lizette, show these ladies to the room of Madame de Sevigne. If they desire a sitting-room–to the Marmousets.”
The inn-keeper gave his commands in the quiet, well-bred tone of a man of the world, to a woman in peasant’s dress. She led us past the open court to an inner one, where we were confronted with a building still older, apparently, than those grouped about the outer quadrangle. The peasant passed quickly beneath an overhanging gallery, draped in vines. She was next preceding us up a spiral turret stairway; the adjacent walls were hung here and there with faded bits of tapestry. Once more she turned to lead us along an open gallery; on this several rooms appeared to open. On each door a different sign was painted in rude Gothic letters. The first was “Chambre de l’Officier;” the second, “Chambre du Cure,” and the next was flung widely open. It was the room of the famous lady of the incomparable Letters. The room might have been left–in the yesterday of two centuries–by the lady whose name it bore. There was a beautiful Seventeenth century bedstead, a couple of wide arm-chairs, with down pillows for seats, and a clothes press with the carvings and brass work peculiar to the epoch of Louis XIV. The chintz hangings and draperies were in keeping, being copies of the brocades of that day. There were portraits in miniature of the courtiers and the ladies of the Great Reign on the very ewers and basins. On the flounced dressing-table, with its antique glass and a diminutive patch-box, now the receptacle of Lubin’s powder, a sprig of the lovely Rose The was exhaling a faint, far-away century perfume. It was surely a stage set for a real comedy; some of these high-coiffed ladies, who knows? perhaps Madame de Sevigne herself would come to life, and give to the room the only thing it lacked–the living presence of that old world grace and speech.
Presently, we sallied forth on a further voyage of discovery. We had reached the courtyard when Monsieur Paul crossed it; it was to ask if, while waiting for the noon breakfast, we would care to see the kitchen; it was, perhaps, different to those now commonly seen in modern taverns.
The kitchen which was thus modestly described as unlike those of our own century might easily, except for the appetizing smell of the cooking fowls and the meats, have been put under lock and key and turned over to a care-taker as a full-fledged culinary museum of antiquities. One entire side of the crowded but orderly little room was taken up by a huge open fireplace. The logs resting on the great andirons were the trunks of full-grown trees. On two of the spits were long rows of fowl and legs of mutton roasting; the great chains were being slowly turned by a _chef_ in the paper cap of his profession. In deep burnished brass bowls lay water-cresses; in Caen dishes of an age to make a bric-a-brac collector turn green with envy, a _Bearnaise_ sauce was being beaten by another gallic master-hand. Along the beams hung old Rouen plates and platters; in the numberless carved Normandy cupboards gleamed rare bits of Delft and Limoges; the walls may be said to have been hung with Normandy brasses, each as burnished as a jewel. The floor was sanded and the tables had attained that satiny finish which comes only with long usage and tireless use of the brush. There was also a shrine and a clock, the latter of antique Norman make and design.
The smell of the roasting fowls and the herbs used by the maker of the sauces, a hungry palate found even more exciting than this most original of kitchens. There was a wine that went with the sauce; this fact Monsieur Paul explained, on our sitting down to the noonday meal; one which, in remembrance of Monsieur Renard’s injunctions, he would suggest our trying. He crossed the courtyard and disappeared into the bowels of the earth, beneath one of the inn buildings, to bring forth a bottle incrusted with layers of moist dirt. This Sauterne was by some, Monsieur Paul smilingly explained, considered as among the real treasures of the inn. Both it and the sauce, we were enabled to assure him a moment later, had that golden softness which make French wines and French sauces at their best the rapture of the palate.
In the courtyard, as our breakfast proceeded, a variety of incidents was happening. We were facing the open archway; through it one looked out upon the high-road. A wheelbarrow passed, trundled by a peasant- girl; the barrow stopped, the girl leaving it for an instant to cross the court.
“_Bonjour, mere–_”
“_Bonjour, ma fille_–it goes well?” a deep guttural voice responded, just outside of the window.
“_Justement_–I came to tell you the mare has foaled and Jean will be late to-night.”
“_Bien._”
“And Barbarine is still angry–“
“Make up with her, my child–anger is an evil bird to take to one’s heart,” the deep voice went on.
“It is my mother,” explained Monsieur Paul. “It is her favorite seat, out yonder, on the green bench in the courtyard. I call it her judge’s bench,” he smiled, indulgently, as he went on. “She dispenses justice with more authority than any other magistrate in town. I am Mayor, as it happens, just now; but madame my mother is far above me, in real power. She rules the town and the country about, for miles. Everyone comes to her sooner or later for counsel and command. You will soon see for yourselves.”
A murmur of assent from all the table accompanied Monsieur Paul’s prophecy.
“_Femme vraiment remarquable_,” hoarsely whispered a stout breakfaster, behind his napkin, between two spoonsful of his soup.
“Not two in a century like her,” said my neighbor.
“No–nor two in all France–_non plus_,” retorted the stout man.
“She could rule a kingdom–hey, Paul?”
“She rules me–as you see–and a man is harder to govern than a province, they say,” smiled Monsieur Paul with a humorous relish, obviously the offspring of experience. “In France, mesdames,” he added, a sweeter look of feeling coming into the deep eyes, “you see we are always children–_toujours enfants_–as long as the mother lives. We are never really old till she dies. May the good God preserve her!” and he lifted his glass toward the green bench. The table drank the toast, in silence.
[Illustration: CHAMBRE DE LA PUCELLES–DIVES]
CHAPTER XVI.
THE GREEN BENCH.
In the course of the first few days we learned what all Dives had known for the past fifty years or so–that the focal point of interest in the inn was centred in Madame Le Mois. She drew us, as she had the country around for miles, to circle close about her green bench.
The bench was placed at the best possible point for one who, between dawn and darkness, made it the business of her life to keep her eye on her world. Not the tiniest mouse nor the most spectral shade could enter or slip away beneath the open archway without undergoing inspection from that omniscient eye, that seemed never to blink nor to grow weary. This same eye could keep its watch, also, over the entire establishment, with no need of the huge body to which it was attached moving a hair’s-breadth. Was it Nitouche, the head-cook, who was grumbling because the kitchen-wench had not scoured the brass saucepans to the last point of mirrory brightness? Behold both Nitouche and the trembling peasant-girl, together with the brasses as evidence, all could be brought at an instant’s call, into the open court. Were the maids–were Marianne or Lizette neglecting their work to flirt with the coachmen in the sheds yonder?
“_Allons, mes filles–doucement, la-bas–et vos lits? qui les fait–les bons saints du paradis, peut-etre?_” And Marianne and Lizette would slink away to the waiting beds. Nothing escaped this eye. If the _poule sultane_ was gone lame, limping in the inner quadrangle, madame’s eye saw the trouble–a thorn in the left claw, before the feathered cripple had had time to reach her objective point, her mistress’s capacious lap, and the healing touch of her skilful surgeon’s fingers. Neither were the cockatoes nor the white parrots given license to make all the noise in the court-yard. When madame had an unusually loquacious moment, these more strictly professional conversationists were taught their place.
“_E’ben, toi_–and thou wishest to proclaim to the world what a gymnast thou art–swinging on thy perch? Quietly, quietly, there are also others who wish to praise themselves! And now, my child, you were telling me how good you had been to your old grandmother, and how she scolded you. Well, and how about obedience to our parents, _hein_–how about that?” This, as the old face bent to the maiden beside her.
There was one, assuredly, who had not failed in his duty to his parents. Monsieur Paul’s whole life, as we learned later, had been a willing sacrifice to the unconscious tyranny of his mother’s affection. The son was gifted with those gifts which, in a Parisian atelier, would easily have made him successful, if not famous. He had the artistic endowment in an unusual degree; it was all one to him, whether he modelled in clay, or carved in wood, or stone, or built a house, or restored old bric-a-brac. He had inherited the old world roundness of artistic ability–his was the plastic renascent touch that might have developed into that of a Giotto or a Benvenuto.
It was such a sacrifice as this that he had lain at his mother’s feet.
Think you for an instant the clever, witty, canny woman in Madame Le Mois looked upon her son’s renouncing the world of Paris, and holding to the glories of Dives and their famous inn in the light of a sacrifice? “_Parbleu!_” she would explode, when the subject was touched on, “it was a lucky thing for him that Paul had had an old mother to keep him from burning his fingers. Paris! What did the provinces want with Paris? Paris had need enough of them, the great, idle, shiftless, dissipated, cruel old city, that ground all their sons to powder, and then scattered their ashes abroad like so many cinders. Oh, yes, Paris couldn’t get along without the provinces, to plunder and rob, to seduce their sons away from living good, pure lives, and to suck these lives as a pig would a trough of fresh water! But the provinces, if they valued their souls, shunned Paris as they would the devil. And as for artists–when it came to the young of the provinces, who thought they could paint or model–
“_Tenez, madame_–this is what Paris does for our young. My neighbor yonder,” and she pointed, as only Frenchwomen point, sticking her thumb into the air to designate a point back of her bench, “my neighbor had a son like Paul. He too was always niggling at something. He niggled so well a rich cousin sent him up to Paris. Well, in ten years he comes back, famous, rich, too, with a wife and even a child. The establishment is complete. Well, they come here to breakfast one fine morning, with his mother, whom he put at a side table, with his nurse–he is ashamed of his mother, you see. Well, then his wife talks and I hear her. ‘_Mais, mon Charles, c’est toi qui est le plus fameux–il n’y a que toi! Tu es un dieu, tu sais–il n’y a pas deux comme toi!_’ The famous one deigns to smile then, and to eat of his breakfast. His digestion had gone wrong, it appears. The _Figaro_ had placed his name second on a certain list, _after_ a rival’s! He alone must be great–there must not be another god of painting save him! He! He! that’s fine, that’s greatness–to lose one’s appetite because another is praised, and to be ashamed of one’s old mother!”
Madame Le Mois’s face, for a moment, was terrible to look upon. Even in her kindliest moments hers was a severe countenance, in spite of the true Norman curves in mouth and nostril–the laughter-loving curves. Presently, however, the fierceness of her severity melted; she had caught sight of her son. He was passing her, now, with the wine bottles for dinner piled up in his arms.
“You see,” croaked the mother, in an exultant whisper, “I’ve saved him from all that–he’s happy, for he still works. In the winter he can amuse himself, when he likes, with his carving and paintbrushes. Ah, _tiens, du monde qui arrive!_” And the old woman seated herself, with an air of great dignity, to receive the new-comers.
The world that came in under the low archway was of an altogether different character from any we had as yet seen. In a satin-lined victoria, amid the cushions, lay a young and lovely-eyed Anonyma. Seated beside her was a weak-featured man, with a huge flower decorating his coat lappel. This latter individual divided the seat with an army of small dogs who leaped forth as the carriage stopped.
Madame Le Mois remained immovable on her bench. Her face was as enigmatic as her voice, as it gave Suzette the order to show the lady to the salon bleu. The high Louis XV. slipper, as it picked its way carefully after Suzette, never seemed more distinctly astray than when its fair wearer confided her safety to the insecure footing of the rough, uneven cobbles. In a brief half-hour the frou-frou of her silken skirts was once more sweeping the court-yard. She and her companion and the dogs chose the open air and a tent of sky for their banqueting-hall. Soon all were seated at one of the many tables placed near the kitchen, beneath the rose-vines.
Madame gave the pair a keen, dissecting glance. Her verdict was delivered more in the emphasis of her shrug and the humor of her broad wink than in the loud-whispered “_Comme vous voyez, chere dame, de toutes sortes ici, chez nous–mais–toujours bon genre!_”
The laughter of one who could not choose her world was stopped, suddenly, by the dipping of the thick fingers into an old snuff-box. That very afternoon the court-yard saw another arrival; this one was treated in quite a different spirit.
A dog-cart was briskly driven into the yard by a gentleman who did not appear to be in the best of humor. He drew his horse up with a sudden fierceness; he as fiercely called out for the hostler. Monsieur Paul bit his lip; but he composedly confronted the disturbed countenance perched on the driver’s seat. The gentleman wished.
“I want indemnity–that is what I want. Indemnity for my horse,” cried out a thick, coarse voice, with insolent authority.
“For your horse? I do not think I understand–“
“O–h, I presume not,” retorted the man, still more insolently; “people don’t usually understand when they have to pay. I came here a week ago, and stayed two days; and you starved my horse–and he died–that is what happened–he died!”
The whole court-yard now rang with the cries of the assembled household. The high, angry tones had called together the last serving-man and scullery-maid; the cooks had come out from their kitchens; they were brandishing their long-handled saucepans. The peasant-women were shrieking in concert with the hostlers, who were raising their arms to heaven in proof of their innocence. Dogs, cats, cockatoes swinging on their perches, peacocks, parrots, pelicans, and every one of the cocks swarmed from the barnyards and garden and cellars, to add their shrill cries and shrieks to the universal babel.
Meanwhile, calm and unruffled as a Hindoo goddess, and strikingly similar in general massiveness of structure and proportion to the common reproduction of such deities, sat Madame Le Mois. She went on with her usual occupation; she was dipping fresh-cut salad leaves into great bowls of water as quietly as if only her own little family were assembled before her. Once only she lifted her heavily-moulded, sagacious eyebrow at the irate dog-cart driver, as if to measure his pitiful strength. She allowed the fellow, however, to touch the point of abuse before she crushed him.
Her first sentence reduced him to the ignominy of silence. All her people were also silent. What, the deep sarcastic voice chanted on the still air–what, this gentleman’s horse had died–and yet he had waited a whole week to tell them of the great news? He was, of a truth, altogether too considerate. His own memory, perhaps, was also a short one, since it told him nothing of the condition in which the poor beast had arrived, dropping with fatigue, wet with sweat, his mouth all blood, and an eye as of one who already was past the consciousness of his suffering? Ah no, monsieur should go to those who also had short memories.
“For we use our eyes–we do. We are used to deal with gentlemen–with Christians” (the Hebrew nose of the owner of the dead horse, even more plainly abused the privilege of its pedigree in proving its race, by turning downward, at this onslaught of the mere’s satire), “as I said, with Christians,” continued the mere, pitilessly. “And do those gentlemen complain and put upon us the death of their horses? No, my fine sir, they return–_ils reviennent, et sont revenus depuis la Conquete!_”
With this fine climax madame announced the court as closed. She bowed disdainfully, with a grand and magisterial air, to the defeated claimant, who crept away, sulkily, through the low archway.
“That is the way to deal with such vermin, Paul; whip them, and they turn tail.” And the mere shook out a great laugh from her broad bosom, as she regaled her wide nostrils with a fresh pinch of snuff. The assembled household echoed the laugh, seasoning it with the glee of scorn, as each went to his allotted place.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE WORLD THAT CAME TO DIVES.
It was a world of many mixtures, of various ranks and habits of life that found its way under the old archway, and sat down at the table d’hote breakfasts and dinners. Madame and her gifted son were far too clever to attempt to play the mistaken part of Providence; there was no pointed assortment made of the sheep and the goats; at least, not in a way to suggest the most remote intention of any such separation being premeditated. Such separation as there was came about in the most natural and in the pleasantest possible fashion. When Petitjean, the pedler, and his wife drove in under the Gothic sign, the huge lumbering vehicle was as quickly surrounded as when any of the neighboring notabilities arrived in emblazoned chariots. Madame was the first to waddle forward, nodding up toward the open hood as, with a short, brisk, business “_Bonjour_,” she welcomed the head of Petitjean and his sharp-eyed spouse looking over the aprons.
The pedler is always popular with his world and Dives knew Petitjean to be as honest as a pedler can ever hope to be in a world where small pence are only made large by some one being sacrificed on the altar of duplicity. Therefore it was that Petitjean’s hearse-like cart was always a welcome visitor;–one could at least be as sure of a just return for one’s money in trading with a pedler as from any other source in this thieving world. In the end, one always got something else besides the bargain to carry away with one. For Petitjean knew all the gossip of the province; after dinner, when the stiff cider was working in his veins, he would be certain to tell all one wanted to know. Even Madame Le Mois, whose days were too busy in summer to include the daily reading of her newspaper, had grown dependent, in these her later years, on such sources of information as the peddler’s garrulous tongue supplied. In the end she had found his talent for fiction quite as reliable as that of the journalists, besides being infinitely more entertaining, abounding in personalities which were the more racy, as the pedler felt himself to be exempt from that curse of responsibility, which, in French journalism, is so often a barrier to the full play of one’s talent.
Therefore it was that Petitjean and his bright-eyed spouse were always made welcome at Dives.
“It goes well, Madame Jean? Ah, there you are. Well, _hein_, also? It is long since we saw you.”
“Ah, madame, centuries, it is centuries since we were here. But what will you have? with the bad season, the rains, the banks failing, the–but you, madame, are well? And Monsieur Paul?” “_Ah, ca va tout doucement_ Paul is well, the good God be praised, but I–I perish day by day” At which the entire court-yard was certain to burst into laughing protest. For the whole household of Guillaume le Conquerant was quite sure to be assembled about the great wheels of the pedler’s wagon–only to look, not to buy, not yet. Petitjean, and his wife had not dined yet, and a pedler’s hunger is something to be respected–one made money by waiting for the hour of digestion. The little crowd of maids, hostlers, cooks, and scullery wenches, were only here to whet their appetite, and to greet Petitjean. Nitouche, the head _chef_, put a little extra garlic in his sauces that day. But in spite of this compliment to their palate, the pedler and his wife dined in the smaller room off the kitchen;–Madame was desolated, but the _salle-a-manger_ was crowded just now. One was really suffocated in there these days! Therefore it was that the two ate the herbaceous sauces with an extra relish, as those conscious of having a larger space for the play of vagrant elbows than their less fortunate brethren. The gossip and trading came later. On the edge of the fading daylight there was still time to see; the chosen articles could easily be taken into the brightly lit kitchen to be passed before the lamps. After the buying and bargaining came the talking. All the household could find time to spend the evening on the old benches; these latter lined the sidewalk just beneath the low kitchen casements. They had been here for many a long year.
What a history of Dives these old benches could have told! What troopers, and beggars, and cowled monks, and wayfarers had sat there!–each sitter helping to wear away the wood till it had come to have the depressions of a drinking-trough. Night after night in the long centuries, as the darkness fell upon the hamlet–what tales and confidences, and what murmured anguish of remorse, what cries for help, what gay talk and light song must have welled up into the dome of sky!
Once, as we sat within the court-yard, under the stars, a young voice sang out. It was so still and quiet every word the youth phrased was as clear as his fresh young voice.
“_Tiens_–it is Mathieu–he is singing _Les Oreillers!_” cried Monsieur Paul, with an accent of pride in his own tone.
The young voice sang on:
“_J’arrive en ce pays
De Basse Normandie,
Vous dire une chanson,
S’il plait la compagnie!_”
“It is an old Norman bridal song,” Monsieur Paul went on, lowering his voice. “One I taught a lot of young boys and lads last winter–for a wedding held here–in the inn.”
Still the fresh notes filled the air:
“_Les amours sont partis
Dans un bateau de verre;
Le bateau a casse
a casse–
Les amours sont parterre._”
“How the old women laughed–and cried–at once! It was years since they had heard it–the old song. And when these boys–their sons and grandsons–sang it, and I had trained them well–they wept for pure delight.”
Again the song went on:
“_Ouvrez la porte, ouvrez!
Nouvelle mariee,
Car si vous ne l’ouvrez
Vous serez accusee_”
“I dressed all the young girls in old costumes,” our friend continued, still in a whisper. “I ransacked all the old chests and closets about here. I got the ladies of the chateaux near by to aid me; they were so interested that many came down from Paris to see the wedding. It was a pretty sight, each in a different dress! Every century since the thirteenth was represented.”
“_Attendez a demain,
La fraiche matinee,
Quand mon oiseau prive
Aura pris sa volee!_”
Clear, strong, free rang the young tenor’s voice–and then it broke into “_Comment–tu dis que Claire est la?_” whereat Monsieur Paul smiled.
“That will be the next wedding–what shall I devise for that? That will also be the ending of a long lawsuit. But he should have sung the last verse–the prettiest of all. Mathieu!” Paul lifted his voice, calling into the dark.
_”Oui, Monsieur Paul!”_
“Sing us the last verse–“
“_Dans ce jardin du Roi
A pris sa reposee,
Cueillant le romarin
La–vande–bouton–nee–_”
The last notes were but faint vibrations, coming from a lengthening distance.
“Ah!” and Monsieur Paul breathed a sigh. “They don’t care about singing. They are doing it all the time they are so much in love. The fathers’ lawsuit ended only last month. They’ve waited three years– happy Claire–happy Mathieu!”
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE CONVERSATION OF PATRIOTS.
The world that found its way to the mayor’s table at this early period of the summer season was largely composed of the class that travels chiefly to amuse others. The commercial gentlemen in France, however, have the outward bearing of those who travel to amuse themselves. The selling of other people’s goods–it is surely as good an excuse as any other for seeing the world! Such an occupation offers an orator, one gifted in conversational talents–talents it would be a pity to see buried in the domestic napkin–a fine arena for display.
The French commercial traveller is indeed a genus apart; he makes a fetish of his trade; he preaches his propaganda. The fat and the lean, the tall and the little, the well or meanly dressed representatives of the great French houses who sat down to dine, as our neighbors or _vis-a-vis_, night after night, were, on the whole, a great credit to their country. Their manners might have been mistaken for those of a higher rank; their gifts as talkers were of such an order as to make listening the better part of discretion.
Dining is always a serious act in France. At this inn the sauces of the _chef_, with their reputation behind them, and the proof of their real excellence before one, the dinner-hour was elevated to the importance of a ceremony. How the petty merchants and the commercial gentlemen ate, at first in silence, as if respecting the appeal imposed by a great hunger, and then warming into talk as the acid cider was passed again and again! What crunching of the sturdy, dark-colored bread between the great knuckles! What huge helps of the famous sauces! What insatiable appetites! What nice appreciation of the right touch of the tricksy garlic! What nodding of heads, clinking of glasses, and warmth of friendship established over the wine-cups! At dessert everyone talked at once. On one occasion the subject of Gambetta’s death was touched on; all the table, as one man, broke out into an effervescence of political babble.
“What a loss! What a death-blow to France was his death!” exclaimed a heavy young man in a pink cravat.
“If Gambetta had lived, Alsace and Lorraine would be ours now, without the firing of a gun!” added an elderly merchant at the foot of the table.
“Ah–h! without the firing of a gun they will come to us yet. I tell you, without the firing of a gun–unless we insist on a battle,” explosively rejoined a fiery-hued little man sitting next to Monsieur Paul; “but you will see–we shall insist. There is between us and Germany an inextinguishable hate–and we must kill, kill, right and left!”
“_Allons–allons!_” protested the table, in chorus.
“Yes, yes, a general massacre, that is what we want; that is what we must have. Men, women, and children–all must fall. I am a married man–but not a woman or a child shall escape–when the time comes,” continued the fiery-eyed man, getting more and more ferocious as he warmed with the thought of his revenge.
“What a monster!” broke in Madame Le Mois, her deep base notes unruffled by the spectacle of her bloodthirsty neighbor’s violence; “you–to bayonet a woman with a child in her arms!”
“I would–I would–“
“Then you would be more cruel than they were. They treated our women with respect.”
There was a murmur of assenting applause, at this sentiment of justice, from the table. But the fiery-eyed man was not to be put down.
“Oh, yes, they were generous enough in ’71, but I should remember their insults of 1815!”
“_Ancienne histoire–ca_” said the mere, dismissing the subject, with a humorous wink at the table.
“As you see,” was Monsieur Paul’s comment on the conversation, as we were taking our after-dinner stroll in the garden–“as you see, that sort of person is the bad element in our country–the dangerous element–unreasoning, revengeful, and ignorant. It is such men as he who still uphold hatreds and keep the flame alive. It is better to have no talent at all for politics–to be harmless like me, for instance, whose worst vice is to buy up old laces and carvings.”
“And roses–“
“Yes–that is another of my vices–to perpetuate the old varieties. They call me along our coast the millionnaire–of roses! Will you have a ‘Marie Louise,’ mademoiselle?”
The garden was as complete in its old time aspect as the rest of the inn belongings. Only the older, rarer varieties of flowers and rose stalks had been chosen to bloom within the beautifully arranged inclosure. _Citronnelle_, purple irises, fringed asters, sage, lavender, _rose-peche_, bachelor’s-button, _the d’Horace_, and the wonderful electric fraxinelle, these and many other shrubs and plants of the older centuries were massed here with the taste of one difficult to please in horticultural arrangements. Our after-dinner walks became an event in our day. At that hour the press of the day’s work was over, and Madame Mere or Monsieur Paul were always ready to join us for a stroll.
“For myself, I do not like large gardens,” Monsieur Paul remarked, during one of these after-dinner saunters. “The monks, in the old days, knew just the right size a garden should be–small and sheltered, with walls–like a strong arm about a pretty woman–to protect the shrubs and flowers. One should enter the garden, also, by a gate which must click as it closes–the click tickles the imagination–it is the sound henceforth connected with silence, with perfumes and seclusion. How far away we seem now, do we not?–from the bustle of the inn court-yard–and yet I could throw a stone into it.”
The only saunterers besides ourselves were the flamingo, who, cautiously, timorously picked his way–as if he were conscious he was only a bunch of feathers hoisted on stilts; the white parrot, who was wabbling across the lawn to a favorite perch in the leaves of a tropical palm; and the peacock, whose train had been spread with a due regard to effect across a bed of purple irises, with a view to annihilating the brilliancy of their rival hues.
The bit of sky framed by these four garden walls always seemed more delicate in tone than that which covered the open court-yard. The birds in the bushes had moments of melodious outbursts they did not, apparently, indulge in along the high-road. And what with the fading lights, the stars pricking their way among the palms, the scents of flowers, and the talk of a poet, it is little wonder that this twilight hour in the old garden was certain to be the most lyrical of the twenty-four.
CHAPTER XIX.
IN LA CHAMBRE DES MARMOUSETS.
“It is the winters, mesdames, that are hard to bear. They are long–they are dull. No one passes along the high-road. It is then, when sometimes the snow is piled knee-deep in the court-yard, it is then I try to amuse myself a little. Last year I did the Jumieges sculptures; they fit in well, do they not?”
It was raining; and Monsieur Paul was paying us an evening call. A great fire was burning in the beautiful Francois I. fireplace of our sitting-room, the famous Chambre des Marmousets. We had not consented that any of the lights should be lit, although the lovely little Louis XIV. chandelier and the antique brass sconces were temptingly filled with fresh candles. The flames of the great logs would suffer no rival illuminations; if the trunks of full-grown trees could not suffice to light up an old room, with low-raftered ceilings, and a mass of bric-a- brac, what could a few thin waxen candles hope to do?
On many other occasions we had thought our marvellous sitting-room had had exceptional moments of beauty. To turn in from the sunlit, open court-yard; to pass beneath, the vine-hung gallery; to lift the great latch of the low Gothic door and to enter the rich and sumptuous interior, where the light came, as in cathedral aisles, only through the jewels of fourteenth-century glass; to close the door; to sit beneath the prismatic shower, ensconced in a nest of old tapestried cushions, and to let the eye wander over the wealth of carvings, of ceramics, of Spanish and Normandy trousseaux chests, on the collection of antique chairs, Dutch porcelains, and priceless embroideries–all the riches of a museum in a living-room–such a moment in the Marmousets we had tested again and again with delectable results. At twilight, also, when the garden was submerged in dew, this old seigneurial chamber was a retreat fit for a sybarite or a modern aesthete. The stillness, the soft luxurious cushions, the rich dusk thickening in the corners, the complete isolation of the old room from the noise and tumult of the inn life, its curious, its delightful unmodernness, made this Marmouset room an ideal setting for any mediaeval picture. Even a sentiment tinctured with modern cynicism would, I think, have borrowed a little antique fervor, if, like the photographic negative our nineteenth-century emotionalism somewhat too closely resembles, in its colorless indefiniteness, the sentiment were sufficiently exposed, in point of time and degree of sensitiveness, to the charm of these old surroundings.
On this particular evening, however, the pattering of the rain without on the cobbles and the great blaze of the fire within, made the old room seem more beautiful than we had yet seen it. Perhaps the capture of our host as a guest was the added treasure needed to complete our collection. Monsieur Paul himself was in a mood of prodigal liberality; he was, as he himself neatly termed the phrase, ripe for confession; not a secret should escape revelation; all the inn mysteries should yield up the fiction of their frauds; the full nakedness of fact should be given to us.
“You see, _cheres dames_, it is not so difficult to create the beautiful, if one has a little taste and great patience. My inn–it has become my hobby, my pride, my wife, my children. Some men marry their art, I espoused my inn. I found her poor, tattered, broken-down, in health, if you will; verily, as your Shakespeare says of some country wench: ‘a poor thing but mine own.'” Monsieur Paul’s possession of the English language was scarcely as complete as the storehouse of his memory. He would have been surprised, doubtless, to learn he had called poor Audrey, “a pure ting, buttaire my noon!”
“She was, however,” he continued, securely, in his own richer Norman, “though a wench, a beautiful one. And I vowed to make her glorious. ‘She shall be famous,’ I vowed, and–and–better than most men I have kept my vow. All France now has heard of Guillaume le Conquerant!”
The pride Monsieur Paul took in his inn was indeed a fine thing to see. The years of toil he had spent on its walls and in its embellishment had brought him the recompense much giving always brings; it had enriched him quite as much as the wealth of his taste and talent had bequeathed to the inn. Latterly, he said, he had travelled much, his collection of curios and antiquities having called him farther afield than many Frenchmen care to wander. His love of Delft had taken him to Holland; his passion for Spanish leather to the country of Velasquez; he must have a Virgin, a genuine fifteenth-century Virgin, all his own; behold her there, in her stiff wooden skirts, a Neapolitan captive. The brass braziers yonder, at which the courtiers of the Henris had warmed their feet, stamping the night out in cold ante chambers, had been secured at Blois; and his collection of tapestries, of stained glass, of Normandy brasses, and Breton carvings had made his own coast as familiar as the Dives streets.
“The priests who sold me these, madame,” he went on, as he picked up a priest’s chasuble, now doing duty as a table covering “would sell their fathers and their mothers. It is all a question of price.”
After a review of the curios came the history of the human collection of antiquities who had peopled the inn and this old room.
Many and various had been the visitors who had slept and dined here and gone forth on their travels along the high-road.
The inn had had a noble origin; it had been built by no less a personage than the great William himself. He had deemed the spot a fitting one in which to build his boats to start forth for his modest project of conquering England. He could watch their construction in the waters of Dives River–that flows still, out yonder, among the grasses of the sea-meadows. For some years the Norman dukes held to the inn, in memory of the success of that clever boat-building. Then for five centuries the inn became a manoir–the seigneurial residence of a certain Sieur de Semilly. It was his arms we saw yonder, joined to those of Savoy, in the door panel, one of the family having married into a branch of that great house.
Of the famous ones of the world who had travelled along this Caen post-road and stopped the night here, humanly tired, like any other humble wayfarer, was a hurried visit from that king who loved his trade–Louis XI. He and his suite crowded into the low rooms, grateful for a bed and a fire, after the weary pilgrimage to the heights of Mont St. Michel. Louis’s piety, however, was not as lasting in its physically exhaustive effects, as were the fleshly excesses of a certain other king–one Henri IV., whose over-appreciation of the oysters served him here, caused a royal attack of colic, as you may read at your pleasure in the State Archives in Paris–since, quite rightly, the royal secretary must write the court physician every detail of so important an event. What with these kingly travellers and such modern uncrowned kings as Puvis de Chavannes, Dumas, George Sand, Daubigny, and Troyon, together with a goodly number of lesser great ones, the famous little inn has had no reason to feel itself slighted by the great of any century. Of all this motley company of notabilities there were two whose visits seemed to have been indefinitely prolonged. There was nothing, in this present flowery, picturesque assemblage of buildings, to suggest a certain wild drama enacted here centuries ago. Nothing either in yonder tender sky, nor in the silvery foliage on a fair day, which should conjure up the image of William as he must have stood again and again beside the little river; nor of the fury of his impatience as the boats were building all too slowly for his hot hopes; nor of the strange and motley crew he had summoned there from all corners of Europe to cut the trees; to build and launch boats; to sail them, finally, across the strip of water to that England he was to meet at last, to grapple with, and overthrow, even as the English huscarles in their turn bore down on that gay Minstrel Taillefer, who rode so insolently forth to meet them, with a song in his throat, tossing his sword in English eyes, still chanting the song of Roland as he fell. None of the inn features were in the least informed with this great, impressive picture of its past. Yet does William seem by far the most realizable of all the personages who have inhabited the old house.
There was another visitor whose presence Monsieur Paul declared was as entirely real as if she, also, had only just passed within the court-yard.
“I know not why it is, but of all these great, _ces fameux_, Madame de Sevigne seems to me the nearest, in point of time. Her visit appears to have happened only yesterday. I never enter her room but I seem to see her moving about, talking, laughing, speaking in epigrams. She mentions the inn, you know, in her letters. She gives the details of her journey in full.”
I, also, knew not why; but, later, after Monsieur Paul had left us, when he had shut himself out, along with the pattering raindrops, and had closed us in with the warmth and the flickering fire-light, there came, with astonishing clearness, a vision of that lady’s visit here. She and her company of friends might have been stopping, that very instant, without, in the open court. I, also, seemed to hear the very tones of their voices; their talk was as audible as the wind rustling in the vines. In the growing stillness the vision grew and grew, till this was what I saw and heard:
[Illustration: CHAMBRE DES MARMOUSETS–DIVES]
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 Sevigne. 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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne’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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne’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 tailles_” 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 Sevigne’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 Sevigne–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 Sevigne.
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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne 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 SEVIGNE]
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 Abbe 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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne’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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne’s brilliantly lit face; “yes, the weather in truth has been perfect.”
“What an adorable journey we have had!” continued Madame de Sevigne, 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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne’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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne’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 Sevigne’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 Sevigne’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 Sevigne’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 Sevigne, 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 Sevigne’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 Sevigne’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 Sevigne’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 Sevigne went on to narrate that once, when at Les Rochers, Madame de La Fayette was quite certain that she, Madame de Sevigne, 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 Sevigne, 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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne, 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 Sevigne, 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 Sevigne’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 Cleves.'” 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 Sevigne; “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 Sevigne–“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 pele-mele! And the hanging, too–why, hanging now seems to me a positively refreshing performance!” And Madame de Sevigne 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 Sevigne. “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 Abbe 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 Sevigne. “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 Abbe 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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne, 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 ca 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 ca 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 candelabres. 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 Jumieges 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, _chere 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 _boutonniere_, 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