“And did you believe that?” cried Gatien. “Well, my papa said to me, ‘Monsieur Lebas will not join you early, for Monsieur de Clagny has begged him as his deputy to sit for him!’ ”
“Indeed!” said Gravier, changing countenance. “And Monsieur de la Baudraye is gone to La Charité!”
“But why do you meddle in such matters?” said Bianchon to Gatien.
“Horace is right,” said Lousteau. “I cannot imagine why you trouble your heads so much about each other; you waste your time in frivolities.”
Horace Bianchon looked at Étienne Lousteau, as much as to say that newspaper epigrams and the satire of the “funny column” were incomprehensible at Sancerre.
On reaching a copse, Monsieur Gravier left the two great men and Gatien, under the guidance of a keeper, to make their way through a little ravine.
“Well, we must wait for Monsieur Gravier,” said Bianchon, when they had reached a clearing.
“You may be a great physician,” said Gatien, “but you are ignorant of provincial life. You mean to wait for Monsieur Gravier?—By this time he is running like a hare, in spite of his little round stomach; he is within twenty minutes of Anzy by now—” Gatien looked at his watch. “Good! he will be just in time.”
“Where?”
“At the château for breakfast,” replied Gatien. “Do you suppose I could rest easy if Madame de la Baudraye were alone with Monsieur de Clagny? There are two of them now; they will keep an eye on each other. Dinah will be well guarded.”
“Ah, ha! Then Madame de la Baudraye has not yet made up her mind?” said Lousteau.
“So mamma thinks. For my part, I am afraid that Monsieur de Clagny has at last succeeded in bewitching Madame de la Baudraye. If he has been able to show her that he had any chance of putting on the robes of the Keeper of the Seals, he may have hidden his moleskin complexion, his terrible eyes, his tousled mane, his voice like a hoarse crier’s, his bony figure, like that of a starveling poet, and have assumed all the charms of Adonis. If Dinah sees Monsieur de Clagny as Attorney-General, she may see him as a handsome youth. Eloquence has great privileges.—Besides, Madame de la Baudraye is full of ambition. She does not like Sancerre, and dreams of the glories of Paris.”
“But what interest have you in all this?” said Lousteau. “If she is in love with the Public Prosecutor!—Ah! you think she will not love him for long, and you hope to succeed him.”
“You who live in Paris,” said Gatien, “meet as many different women as there are days in the year. But at Sancerre, where there are not half a dozen, and where, of those six, five set up for the most extravagant virtue, when the handsomest of them all keeps you at an infinite distance by looks as scornful as though she were of the blood royal, a young man of two-and-twenty may surely be allowed to make a guess at her secrets, since she must then treat him with some consideration.”
“Consideration! So that is what you call it in these parts?” said the journalist with a smile.
“I should suppose Madame de la Baudraye to have too much good taste to trouble her head about that ugly ape,” said Bianchon.
“Horace,” said Lousteau, “look here, O learned interpreter of human nature, let us lay a trap for the Public Prosecutor; we shall be doing our friend Gatien a service, and get a laugh out of it. I do not love Public Prosecutors.”
“You have a keen intuition of destiny,” said Horace. “But what can we do?”
“Well, after dinner we will tell sundry little anecdotes of wives caught out by their husbands, killed, murdered under the most terrible circumstances.—Then we shall see the faces that Madame de la Baudraye and de Clagny will make.”
“Not amiss!” said Bianchon; “one or the other must surely, by look or gesture—”
“I know a newspaper editor,” Lousteau went on, addressing Gatien, “who, anxious to forefend a grievous fate, will take no stories but such as tell the tale of lovers burned, hewn, pounded, or cut to pieces; of wives boiled, fried, or baked; he takes them to his wife to read, hoping that sheer fear will keep her faithful—satisfied with that humble alternative, poor man! ‘You see, my dear, to what the smallest error may lead you!’ says he, epitomizing Arnolfe’s address to Agnes.”
“Madame de la Baudraye is quite guiltless; this youth sees double,” said Bianchon. “Madame Piédefer seems to me far too pious to invite her daughter’s lover to the Château d’Anzy. Madame de la Baudraye would have to hoodwink her mother, her husband, her maid, and her mother’s maid; that is too much to do. I acquit her.”
“Well with more reason because her husband never ‘quits her,’ ” said Gatien, laughing at his own wit.
“We can easily remember two or three stories that will make Dinah quake,” said Lousteau. “Young man—and you too, Bianchon—let me beg you to maintain a stern demeanor; be thorough diplomatists, an easy manner without exaggeration, and watch the faces of the two criminals, you know, without seeming to do so—out of the corner of your eye, or in a glass, on the sly. This morning we will hunt the hare, this evening we will hunt the Public Prosecutor.”
The evening began with a triumph for Lousteau, who returned the album to the lady with this elegy written in it:
Spleen
You ask for verse from me, the feeble prey
Of this self-seeking world, a waif and stray
With none to whom to cling;
From me—unhappy, purblind, hopeless devil!
Who e’en in what is good see only evil
In any earthly thing!This page, the pastime of a dame so fair,
May not reflect the shadow of my care,
For all things have their place.
Of love, to ladies bright, the poet sings,
Of joy, and balls, and dress, and dainty things—
Nay, or of God and Grace.It were a bitter jest to bid the pen
Of one so worn with life, so hating men,
