“Leave it, René,” she would say, “the master had some reason for putting it there.”
Did du Bousquier go on a journey? She fidgeted over his traveling cloak and his linen; she took the most minute precautions for his material comfort. If he was going over to the Prébaudet, she began to consult the weather glass twenty-four hours beforehand. A sleeping dog has eyes and ears for his master, and so it was with Mme. du Bousquier; she used to watch the expression of her husband’s face to read his wishes. And if that burly personage, vanquished by duty-prescribed love, caught her by the waist and kissed her on the forehead, exclaiming, “You are a good woman!” tears of joy filled the poor creature’s eyes. It is probable that du Bousquier felt it incumbent upon him to make compensations which won Rose Marie Victoire’s respect; for the Church does not require that an assumption of wifely devotion should be carried quite so far as Mme. du Bousquier thought necessary. And yet when she listened to the rancorous talk of men who took Constitutional-Royalism as a cloak for their real opinions, the woman of saintly life uttered not a word. She foresaw the downfall of the Church, and shuddered. Very occasionally she would hazard some foolish remark, promptly cut in two by a look from du Bousquier. In the end this life at cross-purposes had a benumbing influence on Mme. du Bousquier’s wits; she found it both simpler and more dignified to keep her mind to herself, and led outwardly a mere animal existence. She grew slavishly submissive, making a virtue of the abject condition to which her husband had reduced her; she did her husband’s will without murmuring in the least. The timid sheep walked in the way marked out by the shepherd; never leaving the bosom of the Church, practising austerities, without a thought of the Devil, his pomps and works. And so, within herself she united the purest Christian virtues, and du Bousquier truly was one of the luckiest men in the kingdom of France and Navarre.
“She will be a simpleton till her last sigh,” said the cruel ex-registrar (now cashiered). But, all the same, he dined at her table twice a week.
The story would be singularly incomplete if it omitted to mention a last coincidence; the Chevalier de Valois and Suzanne’s mother died at the same time.
The Chevalier died with the Monarchy in August 1830. He went to Nonancourt to join the funeral procession; piously making one of the King’s escort to Cherbourg, with the Troisvilles, Castérans, d’Esgrignons, Verneuils, and the rest. He had brought with him his little hoard of savings and the principal which brought him in his annual income, some fifty thousand francs in all, which he offered to a faithful friend of the elder branch to convey to His Majesty. His own death was very near, he said; the money had come to him through the King’s bounty; and, after all, the property of the last of the Valois belonged to the Crown. History does not say whether the Chevalier’s fervent zeal overcame the repugnance of the Bourbon who left his fair kingdom of France without taking one farthing into exile; but the King surely must have been touched by the old noble’s devotion; and this much is at least certain—Césarine, M. de Valois’ universal legatee, inherited scarcely six hundred livres of income at his death. The Chevalier came back to Alençon, brokenhearted and spent with the fatigue of the journey, to die just as Charles X set foot on foreign soil.
Mme. du Val-Noble and her journalist protector, fearing reprisals from the Liberals, were glad of an excuse to return incognito to the village where the old mother died. Suzanne attended the sale of the Chevalier’s furniture to buy some relic of her first good friend, and ran up the price of the snuffbox to the enormous amount of a thousand francs. The Princess Goritza’s portrait alone was worth that sum. Two years afterwards, a young man of fashion, struck with its marvelous workmanship, obtained it of Suzanne for his collection of fine eighteenth century snuffboxes; and so the delicate toy which had been the confidant of the most courtly of love affairs, and the delight of an old age till its very end, is now brought into the semi-publicity of a collection. If the dead could know what is done after they are gone, there would be a flush at this moment on the Chevalier’s left cheek.
If this history should inspire owners of sacred relics with a holy fear, and set them drafting codicils to provide for the fate of such precious souvenirs of a happiness now no more, by giving them into sympathetic hands; even so an enormous service would have been rendered to the chivalrous and sentimental section of the public; but it contains another and a much more exalted moral. … Does it not show that a new branch of education is needed? Is it not an appeal to the so enlightened solicitude of Ministers of Public Instruction to create chairs of anthropology, a science in which Germany is outstripping us?
Modern myths are even less understood of the people than ancient myths, eaten up with myths though we may be. Fables crowd in upon us on every side, allegory is pressed into service on all occasions to explain everything. If fables are the torches of history, as the humanist school maintains, they may be a means of securing empires from revolution, if only professors of history will
