Hitherto the Chevalier’s nose had made a peculiarly elegant appearance in public; never had it been seen to distil a drop of amber, to let fall a dark wafer of moist rappee; but now, with a snuff-bedabbled border about the nostrils, and an unsightly stream taking advantage of the channel hollowed above the upper lip, that nose, which no longer took pains to please, revealed the immense trouble that the Chevalier must have formerly taken with himself. In this neglect you saw the extent, the greatness and persistence of the man’s designs upon Mlle. Cormon. The Chevalier was crushed by a pun from du Coudrai, whose dismissal he however procured. It was the first instance of vindictiveness on the part of the urbane gentleman; but then the pun was atrocious, worse by a hundred cubits than any other ever made by the registrar of mortgages. M. du Coudrai, observing this nasal revolution, had nicknamed the Chevalier “Nérestan” (nez-restant).
Latterly the Chevalier’s witticisms had been few and far between; the anecdotes went the way of the teeth, but his appetite continued as good as ever; out of the great shipwreck of hopes he saved nothing but his digestion; and while he took his snuff feebly, he despatched his dinner with an avidity alarming to behold. You may mark the extent of the havoc wrought in his ideas in the fact that his colloquies with the Princess Goritza grew less and less frequent. He came to Mlle. Armande’s one day with a false calf in front of his shins. The bankruptcy of elegance was something painful, I protest; all Alençon was shocked by it. It scared society to see an elderly young man drop suddenly into his dotage, and from sheer depression of spirits pass from fifty to ninety years. And besides, he had betrayed his secret. He had been waiting and lying in wait for Mlle. Cormon. For ten long years, persevering sportsman that he was, he had been stalking the game, and he had missed his shot. The impotent Republic had won a victory over a valiant Aristocracy, and that in full flood of Restoration! The sham had triumphed over the real; spirit was vanquished by matter, diplomacy by insurrection; and as a final misfortune, a grisette in an outbreak of bad temper, let out the secret of the Chevalier’s levées!
At once he became a man of the worst character. The Liberal party laid all du Bousquier’s foundlings on the Chevalier’s doorstep, while the Faubourg Saint-Germain of Alençon boastingly accepted them; laughed and cried, “The dear Chevalier! What else could he do?” Saint-Germain pitied the Chevalier, took him to its bosom, and smiled more than ever upon him; while an appalling amount of unpopularity was drawn down upon du Bousquier’s head. Eleven persons seceded from the salon Cormon and went over to the d’Esgrignons.
But the especial result of the marriage was a more sharply-marked division of parties in Alençon. The Maison d’Esgrignon represented undiluted aristocracy; for the Troisvilles on their return joined the clique. The Maison Cormon, skilfully influenced by du Bousquier, was not exactly Liberal, nor yet resolutely Royalist, but of that unlucky shade of opinion which produced the 221 members, so soon as the political struggle took a definite shape, and the greatest, most august, and only real power of Kingship came into collision with that most false, fickle, and tyrannical power which, when wielded by an elective body, is known as the power of Parliament.
The third salon, the salon du Ronceret, out and out Radical in its politics, was secretly allied with the Maison Cormon.
With the return from the Prébaudet, a life of continual suffering began for the Abbé de Sponde. He kept all that he endured locked within his soul, uttering not a word of complaint to his niece; but to Mlle. Armande he opened his heart, admitting that taking one folly with another, he should have preferred the Chevalier. M. de Valois would not have had the bad taste to thwart a feeble old man with but a few days to live. Du Bousquier had pulled the old home to pieces.
“Mademoiselle,” the old Abbé said as the thin tears fell from his faded old eyes, “the lime-tree walk, where I have been used to meditate these fifty years, is gone. My dear lime-trees have all been cut down! Just as I am nearing the end of my days the Republic has come back again in the shape of a horrible revolution in the house.”
“Your niece must be forgiven,” said the Chevalier de Valois. “Republicanism is a youthful error; youth goes out to seek for liberty, and finds tyranny in its worst form—the tyranny of the impotent rabble. Your niece, poor thing, has not been punished by the thing wherein she sinned.”
“What is to become of me in a house with naked women dancing all
