“I congratulate you both,” said the Chevalier, with an agreeable smile; “I wish that you may end like the fairy stories, ‘They lived very happily and had a fine—family of children!’ ” Here he shaped a cone of snuff in his palm before adding mockingly, “But, monsieur, you forgot that—er—you wear borrowed plumes.”
Du Bousquier reddened. The false toupee was ten inches awry. Mlle. Cormon raised her eyes to the face of her betrothed, saw the bare cranium, and bashfully looked down again. Never toad looked more venomously at a victim than du Bousquier at the Chevalier.
“A pack of aristocrats that look down on me!” he thought. “I will crush you all some of these days.”
The Chevalier tie Valois imagined that he had regained all the lost ground. But Mlle. Cormon was not the woman to understand the connection between the Chevalier’s congratulation and the allusion to the false toupee; and, for that matter, even if she had understood, her hand had been given. M. de Valois saw too clearly that all was lost. Meantime, as the two men stood without speaking. Mlle. Cormon innocently studied how to amuse them.
“Play a game of reversis,” suggested she, without any malicious intention.
Du Bousquier smiled, and went as future master of the house for the card-table. Whether the Chevalier de Valois had lost his head, or whether he chose to remain to study the causes of his defeat and to remedy it, certain it is that he allowed himself to be led like a sheep to the slaughter. But he had just received the heaviest of all bludgeon blows; and a noble might have been excused if he had been at any rate stunned by it. Very soon the worthy Abbé de Sponde and M. de Troisville returned, and at once Mlle. Cormon hurried into the antechamber, took her uncle aside, and told him in a whisper of her decision. Then, hearing that the house in the Rue du Cygne suited M. de Troisville, she begged her betrothed to do her the service of saying that her uncle knew that the place was for sale. She dared not confide the fib to the Abbé, for fear that he should forget. The falsehood was destined to prosper better than if it had been a virtuous action. All Alençon heard the great news that night. For four days the town had found as much to say as in the ominous days of 1814 and 1815. Some laughed at the idea, others thought it true; some condemned, others approved the marriage. The bourgeoisie of Alençon regarded it as a conquest, and they were the best pleased.
The Chevalier de Valois, next day, among his own circle, brought out this cruel epigram, “The Cormons are ending as they began; stewards and contractors are all on a footing.”
The news of Mlle. Cormon’s choice wont to poor Athanase’s heart; but he showed not a sign of the dreadful tumult surging within. He heard of the marriage at President du Ronceret’s while his mother was playing a game of boston. Mme. Granson, looking up, saw her son’s face in the glass; he looked white, she thought, but then he had been pale ever since vague rumors had reached him in the morning. Mlle. Cormon was the card on which Athanase staked his life, and chill presentiments of impending catastrophe already wrapped him about. When intellect and imagination have exaggerated a calamity till it becomes a burden too heavy for shoulders and brow to bear, when some long-cherished hope fails utterly, and with it the visions which enable a man to forget the fierce vulture cares gnawing at his heart; then, if that man has no belief in himself, in spite of his powers; no belief in the future, in spite of the Power Divine—he is broken in pieces. Athanase was a product of education under the Empire. Fatalism, the Emperor’s creed, spread downwards to the lowest ranks of the army, to the very schoolboys at their desks. Athanase followed Mme. du Ronceret’s play with a stolidity which might so easily have been taken for indifference, that Mme. Granson fancied she had been mistaken as to her son’s feelings.
Athanase’s apparent carelessness explained his refusal to sacrifice his so-called “Liberal” opinions. This word, then recently coined for the Emperor Alexander, proceeded into the language, I believe, by way of Mme. de Staël through Benjamin Constant.
After that fatal evening the unhappy young man took to haunting one of the most picturesque walks along the Sarthe; every artist who comes to Alençon sketches it from that point of view, for the sake of the watermills, and the river gleaming brightly out among the fields, between the shapely well-grown trees on either side. Flat though the land may be, it lacks none of the subdued peculiar charm of French landscape; for in France your eyes are never wearied by glaring Eastern sunlight, nor saddened by too continual mist. It is a lonely spot. Dwellers in the provinces care nothing for beautiful scenery, perhaps because it is always about them, perhaps because there is a sense lacking in them. If there is such a thing as a promenade, a mall, or any spot from which you see a beautiful view, it is sure to be the one unfrequented part of the town. Athanase liked the loneliness, with the water like a living presence in it, and the fields just turning green in the warmth of the early spring sunlight. Occasionally someone who had seen him sitting at a poplar foot, and received an intent gaze from his eyes, would speak to Mme. Granson about him.
“There is something the matter with your son.”
“I know what he is about,” the mother would say with a satisfied air, hinting that he was meditating some
