The Jealousies of a Country Town

without waiting for the Abbé de Sponde or Mademoiselle. When it grew dark, Josette or Jacquelin brought lights as soon as the bell rang, and the old Abbé out in the garden, seeing the drawing-room windows illuminated, hastened slowly towards the house. Every evening the piquet, boston, and whist tables were full, giving an average of twenty-five or thirty persons, including those who came to chat; but often there were as many as thirty or forty, and then Jacquelin took candles into the study and the boudoir. Between eight and nine at night the servants began to fill the antechamber; and nothing short of a revolution would have found anyone in the salon by ten o’clock. At that hour the frequenters of the house were walking home through the streets, discussing the points made, or keeping up a conversation begun in the salon. Sometimes the talk turned on a pocket-handkerchief of land on which somebody had an eye, sometimes it was the division of an inheritance and disputes among the legatees, or the pretensions of the aristocratic set. You see exactly the same thing at Paris when the theatres disgorge.

Some people who talk a great deal about poetry and understand nothing about it, are wont to rail at provincial towns and provincial ways; but lean your forehead on your left hand, as you sit with your feet on the firedogs, and rest your elbow on your knee, and then⁠—if you have fully realized for yourself the level pleasant landscape, the house, the interior, the folks within it and their interests, interests that seem all the larger because the mental horizon is so limited (as a grain of gold is beaten thin between two sheets of parchment)⁠—then ask yourself what human life is. Try to decide between the engraver of the hieroglyphic birds on an Egyptian obelisk, and one of these folk in Alençon playing boston through a score of years with du Bousquier, M. de Valois, Mlle. Cormon, the President of the Tribunal, the Public Prosecutor, the Abbé de Sponde, Mme. Granson e tutti quanti. If the daily round, the daily pacing of the same track in the footsteps of many yesterdays, is not exactly happiness, it is so much like it that others, driven by dint of storm-tossed days to reflect on the blessings of calm, will say that it is happiness indeed.

To give the exact measure of the importance of Mlle. Gormen’s salon, it will suffice to add that du Bousquier, a born statistician, computed that its frequenters mustered among them a hundred and thirty-one votes in the electoral college, and eighteen hundred thousand livres of income derived from lands in the province. The town of Alençon was not, it is true, completely represented there. The aristocratic section, for instance, had a salon of their own, and the receiver-general’s house was a sort of official inn kept, as in duty bound, by the Government, where everybody who was anybody danced, flirted, fluttered, fell in love, and supped. One or two unclassified persons kept up the communications between Mlle. Cormon’s salon and the other two, but the Cormon salon criticised all that passed in the opposed camps very severely. Sumptuous dinners gave rise to unfavorable comment; ices at a dance caused searchings of heart; the women’s behavior and dress and any innovations were much discussed.

Mlle. Cormon being, as it were, the style of the firm, and figurehead of an imposing coterie, was inevitably the object of any ambition as profound as that of the du Bousquier or the Chevalier de Valois. To both gentlemen she meant a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, with a peerage for the Chevalier, a receiver-general’s post for du Bousquier. A salon admittedly of the first rank is every whit as hard to build up in a country town as in Paris. And here was the salon ready made. To marry Mlle. Cormon was to be lord of Alençon. Finally, Athanase, the only one of the three suitors that had ceased to calculate, cared as much for the woman as for her money.

Is there not a whole strange drama (to use the modern cant phrase) in the relative positions of these four human beings? There is something grotesque, is there not, in the idea of three rival suitors eagerly pressing about an old maid who never so much as suspected their intentions, in spite of her intense and very natural desire to be married? Yet although, things being so, it may seem an extraordinary thing that she should not have married before, it is not difficult to explain how and why, in spite of her fortune and her three suitors, Mlle. Cormon was still unwed.

From the first, following the family tradition. Mlle. Cormon had always wished to marry a noble, but between the years 1789 and 1799 circumstances were very much against her. While she would have wished to be the wife of a person of condition, she was horribly afraid of the Revolutionary Tribunal; and these two motives weighing about equally, she remained stationary, according to a law which holds equally good in aesthetics or statics. At the same time, the condition of suspended judgment is not unpleasant for a girl, so long as she feels young and thinks that she can choose where she pleases. But, as all France knows, the system of government immediately preceding the wars of Napoleon produced a vast number of widows; and the number of heiresses was altogether out of proportion to the number of eligible men. When order was restored in the country, in the time of the Consulate, external difficulties made marriage as much of a problem as ever for Rose Marie Victoire. On the one hand, she declined to marry an elderly man; and, on the other, dread of ridicule and circumstances put quite young men out of the question. In those days heads of families married their sons as mere boys, because in this way they escaped the conscription. With the