The reinforcement of Vinet’s household and ideas by the arrival of Madame and Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf gave the utmost cohesion to the Liberal party. This coalition brought consternation to the aristocracy of Provins and the Tiphaine party. Madame de Bréautey, in dismay at seeing two women of family so misled, begged them to come to see her. She bewailed the blunders committed by the Royalists, and was furious with those of Troyes on learning the poverty of this mother and daughter.
“What! was there no old country gentleman who would marry that dear girl, born to rule a château?” cried she. “They had let her run to seed, and now she will throw herself at the head of a Rogron!”
She hunted the department through and failed to find one gentleman who would marry a girl whose mother had but two thousand francs a year. Then the “clique” of the Tiphaines and the Sous-préfet also set to work, but too late, to discover such a man. Madame de Bréautey inveighed loudly against the selfishness that was eating up France, the result of materialism and of the power conferred on money by the laws; the nobility was nothing in these days! Beauty was nothing! Rogrons and Vinets were defying the King of France!
Bathilde had the indisputable advantage over her rival not merely of beauty, but of dress. She was dazzlingly fair. At five-and-twenty her fully-developed shoulders and splendid modeling were exquisitely full. The roundness of her throat, the slenderness of her articulations, the splendor of her fine fair hair, the charm of her smile, the elegant shape of her head, the dignity and outline of her face, her fine eyes under a well-moulded brow, her calm and well-bred movements, and her still girlish figure, all were in harmony. She had a fine hand and a narrow foot. Her robust health gave her, perhaps, the look of a handsome inn-servant; “but that should be no fault in Rogron’s eyes,” said pretty Madame Tiphaine.
The first time Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf was seen she was dressed simply enough. Her dress of brown merino, edged with green embroidery, was cut low; but a kerchief of tulle, neatly drawn down by invisible strings, covered her shoulders, back, and bust, a little open at the throat, though fastened by a brooch and chain. Under this fine network Bathilde’s beauty was even more attractive, more suggestive. She took off her velvet bonnet and her shawl on entering, and showed pretty ears with gold eardrops. She had a little cross and heart on black velvet round her neck, which contrasted with its whiteness like the black that fantastic nature sets round the tail of a white Angora cat. She was expert in all the arts of girls on their promotion: twisting her fingers to arrange curls that are not out of place, displaying her wrists by begging Rogron to button her cuff, which the hapless man, quite dazzled, bluntly refused to do, hiding his agitation under assumed indifference. The bashfulness of the only passion our haberdasher was ever to know in his life always gave it the demeanor of hatred. Sylvie, as well as Céleste Habert, misunderstood it; not so the lawyer, the superior man of this company of simpletons, whose only enemy was the priest, for the Colonel had long been his ally.
Gouraud, on his part, thenceforth behaved to Sylvie as Bathilde did to Rogron. He appeared in clean linen every evening; he wore velvet collars, which gave effect to his martial countenance, set off by the corners of his white shirt collar; he adopted white drill waistcoats, and had a new frock-coat made of blue cloth, on which his red rosette was conspicuous, and all under pretence of doing honor to the fair Bathilde. He never smoked after two o’clock. His grizzled hair was brushed down in a wave over his ochre-colored skull. In short, he assumed the appearance and attitude of a party chief, of a man who was prepared to rout the enemies of France—in one word, the Bourbons—with tuck of drum.
The satanical pleader and the cunning Colonel played a still more cruel trick on Monsieur and Mademoiselle Habert than that of introducing the beautiful Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf, who was pronounced by the Liberal party and by the Bréauteys to be ten times handsomer than the beautiful Madame Tiphaine. These two great country-town politicians had it rumored from one to another that Monsieur Habert agreed with them on all points. Provins before long spoke of him as a “Liberal-priest.” Called up before the Bishop, Monsieur Habert was obliged to give up his evenings with the Rogrons, but his sister still went there. Thenceforth the Rogron drawing-room was a fact and a power.
And so, by the middle of that year, political intrigues were not less eager than matrimonial intrigues in the Rogrons’ rooms. While covert interests, buried out of sight, were fighting wildly for the upper hand, the public struggle won disastrous notoriety. Everybody knows that the Villèle ministry was overthrown by the elections of 1826. In the Provins constituency, Vinet, the Liberal candidate—for whom Monsieur Cournant had obtained his qualification by the purchase of some land of which the price remained unpaid—came very near beating Monsieur Tiphaine. The President had a majority of only two.
Mesdames Vinet and de Chargeboeuf, Vinet and the Colonel, were sometimes joined by Monsieur Cournant and his wife; then by Néraud the doctor, a man whose youth had been very “stormy,” but who now took serious views of life; he had devoted himself to science, it was said, and if the Liberals were to be believed, was a far cleverer man
