After which they appoint a day for making the purchases, and set out together in a cab, a cab with a luggage rack on top, to a big grocery store over the river in the new quarters, with an air of great mystery, and return at dinnertime, worn out but still excited, jolting along in the carriage, its roof covered with packages and sacks like a removal van.
For the Chantals, all that part of Paris situated at the other side of the Seine constituted the new quarters, quarters inhabited by a strange noisy people, with the shakiest notions of honesty, who spent their days in dissipation, their nights feasting, and threw money out of the windows. From time to time, however, the young girls were taken to the theatre to the Opéra Comique or the Française, when the play was recommended by the paper Monsieur Chantal read.
The young girls are nineteen and seventeen years old today; they are two beautiful girls, tall and clear-skinned, very well trained, too well trained, so well trained that they attract no more attention than two pretty dolls. The idea never occurred to me to take any notice of them or to court the Chantal girls; I hardly dared speak to them, they seemed so unspotted from the world; I was almost afraid of offending against the proprieties in merely raising my hat.
The father himself is a charming man, very cultured, very frank, very friendly, but desirous of nothing so much as repose, quiet, and tranquillity, and mainly instrumental in mummifying his family into mere symbols of his will, living and having their being in a stagnant peacefulness. He read a good deal, from choice, and his emotions were easily stirred. His avoidance of all contact with life, common jostlings and violence had made his skin, his moral skin, very sensitive and delicate. The least thing moved and disturbed him, hurt him.
The Chantals had some friends, however, but friends admitted to their circle with many reserves, and chosen carefully from neighbouring families. They also exchanged two or three visits a year with relatives living at a distance.
As for me, I dine at their house on the fifteenth of August and on Twelfth Night. That is as sacred a duty to me as Easter communion to a Catholic.
On the fifteenth of August a few friends were asked, but on Twelfth Night I was the only guest and the only outsider.
II
Well, this year, as in every other year, I had gone to dine at the Chantals’ to celebrate Epiphany.
I embraced Monsieur Chantal, as I always did, Madame Chantal, and Mademoiselle Pearl, and I bowed deeply to Mesdemoiselles Louise and Pauline. They questioned me about a thousand things, boulevard happenings, politics, our representatives, and what the public thought of affairs in Tonkin. Madame Chantal, a stout lady whose thoughts always impressed me as being square like blocks of stone, was wont to enunciate the following phrase at the end of every political discussion: “All this will produce a crop of misfortunes in the future.” Why do I always think that Madame Chantal’s thoughts are square? I don’t really know why; but my mind sees everything she says in this fashion: a square, a solid square with four symmetrical angles. There are other people whose thoughts always seems to me round and rolling like circles. As soon as they begin a phrase about something, out it rolls, running along, issuing in the shape of ten, twenty, fifty round thoughts, big ones and little ones, and I see them running behind each other out of sight over the edge of the sky. Other persons have pointed thoughts. … But this is somewhat irrelevant.
We sat down to table in the usual order, and dinner passed without anyone uttering a single memorable word. With the sweets, they brought in the Twelfth Night cake. Now, each year, Monsieur Chantal was king. Whether this was a series of chances or a domestic convention I don’t know, but invariably he found the lucky bean in his piece of cake, and he proclaimed Madame Chantal queen. So I was amazed to find in a mouthful of pastry something very hard that almost broke one of my teeth. I removed the object carefully from my mouth and I saw a tiny china doll no larger than a bean. Surprise made me exclaim: “Oh!” They all looked at me and Chantal clapped his hands and shouted: “Gaston’s got it. Gaston’s got it. Long live the king! Long live the king!”
The others caught up the chorus: “Long live the king!” And I blushed to my ears, as one often does for no reason whatever, in slightly ridiculous situations. I sat looking at my boots, holding the fragment of china between two fingers, forcing myself to laugh, and not knowing what to do or what to say, when Chantal went on: “Now he must choose a queen.”
I was overwhelmed. A thousand thoughts and speculations rushed across my mind in a second of time. Did they want me to choose out one of the Chantal girls? Was this a way of making me say which one I liked the better? Was it a gentle, delicate, almost unconscious feeler that the parents were putting out towards a possible marriage? The thought of marriage stalks all day and every day in families that possess marriageable daughters; it takes innumerable shapes and guises and adopts every possible means. I was suddenly dreadfully afraid of compromising myself, and extremely timid too, before the obstinately correct and rigid bearing of Mesdemoiselles Louise and Pauline. To select one of them over the head
