The lights, the groups of well-dressed women, the serious and magisterial air of the assembly, filled Mlle. Cormon with pride in the aristocratic appearance of the rooms, a pride in which her guests all shared. There were plenty of people who thought that the finest company of Paris itself was no finer. At that moment du Bousquier, playing a rubber with M. de Valois and two elderly ladies, Mme. du Coudrai and Mme. du Ronceret, was the object of suppressed curiosity. Several women came up on the pretext of watching the game, and gave him such odd, albeit furtive, glances that the old bachelor at last began to think that there must be something amiss with his appearance.
“Can it be that my toupee is askew?” he asked himself. And he felt that all-absorbing uneasiness to which the elderly bachelor is peculiarly subject. A blunder gave him an excuse for leaving the table at the end of the seventh rubber.
“I cannot touch a card but I lose,” he said; “I am decidedly too unlucky at cards.”
“You are lucky in other respects,” said the Chevalier, with a knowing look. Naturally, the joke made the round of the room, and everyone exclaimed over the exquisite breeding shown by the Prince Talleyrand of Alençon.
“There is no one like M. de Valois for saying such things,” said the niece of the curé of St. Leonard’s.
Du Bousquier went up to the narrow mirror above The Deserter, but he could detect nothing unusual.
Towards ten o’clock, after innumerable repetitions of the same phrase with every possible variation, the long antechamber began to fill with visitors preparing to embark; Mlle. Cormon convoying a few favored guests as far as the perron for a farewell embrace. Knots of guests took their departure, some in the direction of the Brittany road and the château, and others turning toward the quarter by the Sarthe. And then began the exchange of remarks with which the streets had echoed at the same hour for a score of years. There was the inevitable, “Mlle. Cormon looked very well this evening.”
“Mlle. Cormon? She looked strange, I thought.”
“How the Abbé stoops, poor man! And how he goes to sleep—did you see? He never knows where the cards are now; his mind wanders.”
“We shall be very sorry to lose him.”
“It is a fine night. We shall have a fine day tomorrow.”
“Fine weather for the apples to set.”
“You beat us tonight; you always do when M. de Valois is your partner.”
“Then how much did he win?”
“Tonight? Why, he won three or four francs. He never loses.”
“Faith, no. There are three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, you know; at that rate, whist is as good as a farm for him.”
“Oh! what bad luck we had tonight!”
“You are very fortunate, monsieur and madame, here you are at your own doorstep, while we have half the town to cross.”
“I do not pity you; you could keep a carriage if you liked, you need not go afoot.”
“Ah! monsieur, we have a daughter to marry (that means one wheel), and a son to keep in Paris, and that takes the other.”
“Are you still determined to make a magistrate of him?”
“What can one do? You must do something with a boy, and besides, it is no disgrace to serve the King.”
Sometimes a discussion on cider or flax was continued on the way, the very same things being said at the same season year after year. If any observer of human nature had lived in that particular street, their conversation would have supplied him with an almanac. At this moment, however, the talk was of a decidedly Rabelaisian turn; for du Bousquier, walking on ahead by himself, was humming the well-known tune “Femme sensible, entends-tu le ramage?” without a suspicion of its appropriateness. Some of the party held that du Bousquier was uncommonly long-headed, and that people judged him unjustly. President du Ronceret inclined toward this view since he had been confirmed in his post by a new royal decree. The rest regarded the forage-contractor as a dangerous man of lax morals, of whom anything might be expected. In the provinces, as in Paris, public men are very much in the position of the statue in Addison’s ingenious fable. The statue was erected at a place where four roads met; two cavaliers coming up on opposite sides declared, the one that it was white, the other that it was black, until they came to blows, and both of them lying on the ground discovered that it was black on one side and white on the other, while a third cavalier coming up to their assistance affirmed that it was red.
When the Chevalier de Valois reached home, he said to himself: “It is time to spread a report that I am going to marry Mlle. Cormon. The news shall come from the d’Esgrignon’s salon; it shall go straight to the Bishop’s palace at Séez and come back through one of the vicars-general to the curé of St. Leonard’s. He will not fail to tell the Abbé Couturier, and in this way Mlle. Cormon will receive the shot well under the waterline. The old Marquis d’Esgrignon is sure to ask the Abbé de Sponde to dinner to put a stop to gossip which might injure Mlle. Cormon if I fail to come forward; or me, if she refuses me. The Abbé shall be well and duly entangled; and after a call from Mlle. de Gordes, in the course of which the grandeur and the prospects of the alliance will be put before Mlle. Cormon, she is not likely to hold out. The Abbé will leave her more than a hundred thousand crowns; and as for her, she must have put by more than a hundred thousand livres
