The Spaniard died in 1813, leaving a widow of two-and-thirty with an enormous fortune and the prettiest little daughter in the world, at that time eleven years old, promising to become, as indeed she became, a very accomplished person. Clever as Madame Evangelista might be, the Restoration altered her position; the Royalist party sifted itself, and several families left Bordeaux. Still, though her husband’s head and hand were lacking to the management of the business, for which she showed the inaptitude of a woman of fashion and the indifference of the Creole, she made no change in her mode of living.
By the time when Paul de Manerville had made up his mind to return to his native place, Mademoiselle Natalie Evangelista was a remarkably beautiful girl, and apparently the richest match in Bordeaux, where no one knew of the gradual diminution of her mother’s wealth; for, to prolong her reign, Madame Evangelista had spent vast sums of money. Splendid entertainments and almost royal display had kept up the public belief in the wealth of the house.
Natalie was nearly nineteen, no offer of marriage had as yet come to her mother’s ear. Accustomed to indulge all her girlish fancies, Mademoiselle Evangelista had Indian shawls and jewels, and lived amid such luxury as frightened the speculative, in a land and at a time when the young are as calculating as their parents. The fatal verdict, “Only a prince could afford to marry Mademoiselle Evangelista,” was a watchword in every drawing-room and boudoir. Mothers of families, dowagers with granddaughters to marry, and damsels jealous of the fair Natalie, whose unfailing elegance and tyrannous beauty were an annoyance to them, took care to add venom to this opinion by perfidious insinuations. When an eligible youth was heard to exclaim with rapturous admiration on Natalie’s arrival at a ball—“Good Heavens, what a beautiful creature!”—“Yes,” the mammas would reply, “but very expensive!” If some newcomer spoke of Mademoiselle Evangelista as charming, and opined that a man wanting a wife could not make a better choice—“Who would be bold enough,” someone would ask, “to marry a girl to whom her mother allows a thousand francs a month for dress, who keeps horses and a lady’s maid, and wears lace? She has Mechlin lace on her dressing-gowns. What she pays for washing would keep a clerk in comfort. She has morning capes that cost six francs apiece to clean!”
Such speeches as these, constantly repeated by way of eulogium, extinguished the keenest desire a youth might feel to wed Mademoiselle Evangelista. The queen of every ball, surfeited with flattery, sure of smiles and admiration wherever she went, Natalie knew nothing of life. She lived as birds fly, as flowers bloom, finding everyone about her ready to fulfil her least wish. She knew nothing of the price of things, nor of how money is acquired or kept. She very likely supposed that every house was furnished with cooks and coachmen, maids and menservants, just as a field produces fodder and trees yield fruit. To her the beggar, the pauper, the fallen tree, and the barren field were all the same thing. Cherished like a hope by her mother, fatigue never marred her pleasure; she pranced through the world like a courser on the Steppe, a courser without either bridle or shoes.
Six months after Paul’s arrival the upper circles of the town had brought about a meeting between “Peas-blossom” and the queen of the ballroom. The two flowers looked at each other with apparent coldness, and thought each other charming. Madame Evangelista, as being interested in this not unforeseen meeting, read Paul’s sentiments in his eyes, and said to herself, “He will be my son-in-law”; while Paul said to himself, as he looked at Natalie, “She will be my wife!” The wealth of the Evangelistas, proverbial in Bordeaux, remained in Paul’s memory as a tradition of his boyhood, the most indelible of all such impressions. And so pecuniary suitability was a foregone conclusion, without all the discussion and inquiry, which are as horrible to shy as to proud natures.
When some persons tried to express to Paul the praise which it was impossible to refuse to Natalie’s manner and beauty and wit, always ending with some of the bitterly mercenary reflections as to the future to which the expensive style of the household naturally gave rise, Peas-blossom replied with the disdain that such provincialism deserves. And this way of treating the matter, which soon became known, silenced these remarks; for it was Paul who set the ton in ideas and speech as much as in manners and appearance. He had imported the French development of the British stamp and its icebound barriers, its Byronic irony, discontent with life, contempt for sacred bonds, English plate and English wit, the scorn of old provincial customs and old property; cigars, patent leather, the pony, lemon-colored gloves, and the canter. So that befell Paul which had happened to no one before—no old dowager or young maid tried to discourage him.
Madame Evangelista began by inviting him to several grand dinners. Could Peas-blossom remain absent from the entertainments to which the most fashionable young men of the town were bidden? In spite of Paul’s affected coldness, which did not deceive either the mother or the daughter, he found himself taking the first steps on the road to marriage. When Manerville passed in his tilbury, or riding a good horse, other young men would stop to watch him, and he could hear their comments: “There is a lucky fellow; he is rich, he is handsome, and they say he is to marry Mademoiselle Evangelista. There
