In answer to questions, they always spoke gravely of the Chevalier de Valois; they watched over him. For others he became a venerable gentleman, his life was a flower of sanctity. But at home they would have lighted on his shoulders like parakeets.
The Chevalier liked to know the intimate aspects of family life which laundresses learn; they used to go up to his room of a morning to retail the gossip of the town; he called them his “gazettes in petticoats,” his “living feuilletons.” M. Sartine himself had not such intelligent spies at so cheap a rate, nor yet so loyal in their rascality. Remark, moreover, that the Chevalier thoroughly enjoyed his breakfasts.
Suzanne was one of his favorites. A clever and ambitious girl with the stuff of a Sophie Arnould in her, she was besides as beautiful as the loveliest courtesan that Titian ever prayed to pose against a background of dark velvet as a model for his Venus. Her forehead and all the upper part of her face about the eyes were delicately moulded; but the contours of the lower half were cast in a commoner mould. Hers was the beauty of a Normande, fresh, plump, and brilliant-complexioned, with that Rubens fleshiness which should be combined with the muscular development of a Farnese Hercules: This was no Venus de’ Medici, the graceful feminine counterpart of Apollo.
“Well, child,” ’ said the Chevalier, “tell me your adventures little or big.”
The Chevalier’s fatherly benignity with these grisettes would have marked him out anywhere between Paris and Peking. The girls put him in mind of the courtesans of another age, of the illustrious queens of opera of European fame during a good third of the eighteenth century. Certain it is that he who had lived for so long in a world of women now as dead and forgotten as the Jesuits, the buccaneers, the abbés, and the farmers-general, and all great things generally—certain it is that the Chevalier had acquired an irresistible good humor, a gracious ease, an unconcern, with no trace of egoism discernible in it. So might Jupiter have appeared to Alemena—a king that chooses to be a woman’s dupe, and flings majesty and its thunderbolts to the winds, that he may squander Olympus in follies, and “little suppers,” and feminine extravagance; wishful, of all things, to be far enough away from Juno.
The room in which the Chevalier received company was bare enough, with its shabby bit of tapestry to do duty as a carpet, and very dirty, old-fashioned easy-chairs; the walls were covered with a cheap paper, on which the countenances of Louis XVI and his family, framed in weeping willow, appeared at intervals among funeral urns, bearing the sublime testament by way of inscription, amid a whole host of sentimental emblems invented by Royalism under the Terror; but in spite of all this, in spite of the old flowered green silk dressing-gown, in spite of its owner’s air of dilapidation, a certain fragrance of the eighteenth century clung about the Chevalier de Valois as he shaved himself before the old-fashioned toilet glass, covered with cheap lace. All the graceless graces of his youth seemed to reappear; he might have had three hundred thousand francs’ worth of debts to his name, and a chariot at his door. He looked a great man, great as Berthier in the Retreat from Moscow issuing the order of the day to battalions which were no more.
“M. le Chevalier,” Suzanne replied archly, “it seems to me that I have nothing to tell you—you have only to look!”
So saying, she turned and stood sidewise to prove her words by ocular demonstrations; and the Chevalier, deep old gentleman, still holding his razor across his chin, cast his right eye downwards upon the damsel, and pretended to understand.
“Very good, my little pet, we will have a little talk together presently. But you come first, it seems, to me.”
“But, M. le Chevalier, am I to wait till my mother beats me and Mme. Lardot turns me away? If I do not go to Paris at once, I shall never get married here, where the men are so ridiculous.”
“These things cannot be helped, child! Society changes, and women suffer just as much as the nobles from the shocking confusion which ensues. Topsy-turvydom in politics ends in topsy-turvy manners. Alas! woman soon will cease to be woman” (here he took the cotton wool out of his ears to continue his toilet). “Women will lose a great deal by plunging into sentiment; they will torture their nerves, and there will be an end of the good old ways of our time, when a little pleasure was desired without blushes, and accepted without more ado, and the vapors” (he polished the earrings with the Negroes’ heads)—“the vapors were only known as a means of getting one’s way; before long they will take the proportions of a complaint only to be cured by an infusion of orange-blossoms.” (The Chevalier burst out laughing.) “Marriage, in short,” he resumed, taking a pair of tweezers to pluck out a gray hair, “marriage will come to be a very dull institution indeed, and it was so joyous in my time. The reign of Louis Quatorze and Louis Quinze, bear this in mind, my child, saw the last of the finest manners in the world.”
“But, M. le Chevalier,” urged the girl, “it is your little Suzanne’s character and reputation that is at stake, and you are not going to forsake her, I hope!”
“What is all this?” cried the Chevalier,
