He left the room without awaiting her answer. When, an hour later, Védie came in to clear away the breakfast, she found her mistress pale and in a perspiration in spite of the cool season. Flore was feeling like a woman who has fallen to the bottom of a precipice; she saw nothing before her but blackness, and on that blackness, as in some dark beyond, flitted monstrous things, indistinctly seen, and filling her with terror. She felt the damp chill of these caverns. She was instinctively afraid of this man, and nevertheless a voice cried to her that she deserved to have him for her master. She could not struggle against fate; Flore Brazier, for decency’s sake, had rooms in Père Rouget’s house, but Madame Rouget belonged to her husband, and so was bereft of the inestimable independence that a housekeeper-mistress preserves.
In this dreadful position she hoped she might have a child; but in the last five years Jean-Jacques had become absolutely decrepit. This marriage was to the poor old man what Louis XII’s second marriage was to him. Again, the constant watchfulness of such a man as Philippe, who had nothing to do, for he gave up his employment, made any kind of vengeance impossible. Benjamin was an innocent but devoted spy. La Védie quaked in Philippe’s presence. Flore was alone and helpless. To crown all, she was afraid of death; without knowing how Philippe could make away with her, she guessed that the suspicion of a coming heir would be her death-warrant; the sound of that voice, the covert flash of that gambler’s eye, the soldier’s slightest movement—treating her as he did with the politest brutality—made her shudder. As to the power of attorney demanded by the ferocious Colonel, who was a hero in the eyes of Issoudun, he had it as soon as he asked for it; for Flore fell under his dominion as France had fallen under that of Napoleon.
Rouget meanwhile, like a moth whose feet are caught in the burning wax of a taper, was fast wasting his remaining strength; and his nephew, looking on at this lingering death, was as unmoved as the diplomatists who, in 1814, watched the convulsions of Imperial France.
Philippe, who had no belief in Napoleon II, then wrote the following letter to the War Minister, and Mariette got it delivered by the Duc de Maufrigneuse:—
Monseigneur—
Napoleon no longer lives. I remained faithful to him after taking the oath; but now I am at liberty to offer my services to His Majesty. If your Excellency would condescend to explain my conduct to His Majesty, the King will understand that it has conformed to the laws of honor, if not to those of the realm. The King, who thought it but natural that his aide-de-camp, General Rapp, should mourn for his former master, will no doubt be equally indulgent to me. Napoleon was my benefactor.
I therefore entreat your Excellency to take into consideration my request for employment with my full rank, assuring you of my entire submission. This will show you, monseigneur, that the King will find me the most faithful of his subjects.
Accept, I beg, the expression of respect with which I have the honor to remain
With this letter was a request for permission to visit Paris on urgent private affairs, supported by Mouilleron, who annexed letters from the Maire, the Sous-préfet, and the Superintendent of Police at Issoudun, who all spoke in praise of Philippe, and dwelt on the article written on the occasion of his uncle’s marriage.
A fortnight later, at the time when the picture exhibition was opened, Philippe received the permit he had asked for, and a letter, in which the War Minister informed him that, by the King’s orders, he was, as a first favor, reinstated on the Army List as Lieutenant-Colonel.
Philippe moved to Paris with his aunt and old Rouget, whom he carried off to the Treasury three days after their arrival to sign the transfer of the State bond, which thus became his own property. The feeble old man and la Rabouilleuse were flung by their nephew into frantic dissipations and the dangerous company of indefatigable actresses, journalists, artists, and women of equivocal character, among whom Philippe had spent his youth, and where old Rouget found Rabouilleuses enough to be the death of him. Giroudeau undertook that Père Rouget should die the happy death made famous since, it is said, by a Marshal of France. Lolotte, one of the handsomest “walking ladies” at the Opera, was Rouget’s bewitching assassin. The old man died after a splendid supper given by Florentine; and whether the supper or Mademoiselle Lolotte finished off the old provincial, it is difficult to decide. Lolotte ascribed his death to a slice of pate de foie gras; and as the Strasbourg pie could make no rejoinder, it is taken as proved that the good man died of indigestion.
Madame Rouget found herself in her element in
