CHAPTER XI.A WATERING-PLACE.
ARVILLARD LES BAINS,2d August, ’76.
“Well, it is queer enough, this place from which I am writing to you. Imagine a square hall, very lofty, paved with stones, done in stucco work—a sonorous hall, where the daylight falling through two enormous windows is veiled down to the lowest pane with blue curtains and further obscured by a sort of floating vapor, having a taste of sulphur in it, which clings to one’s clothes and tarnishes one’s gold ornaments. In this hall are people seated near the walls, on benches, chairs and stools round little tables—people who look at their watches every minute, get up and go out, leaving their seats to others, letting one see each time through the half-open door a mob of bathers moving about in the brightly lit vestibule and the flowing white aprons of the serving women who dash here and there. In spite of all this movement, no noise, but a continual murmur of conversation in low voices, newspapers being unfolded, badly oxidized pens scratching on paper, a solemnity as in a church—the whole place bathed and refreshed by the big stream of mineral waterarranged in the middle of the hall, the rush of which breaks itself against a disk of metal, is crushed to pieces, separates in jets and turns to powder above the great basins placed one upon the other and all dripping with moisture. This is the inhalation hall.
“I must let you know, my dear girl, that everybody does not inhale in the same way. For instance, the old gentleman who sits in front of me at this moment follows the prescriptions of the doctor to the letter, for I recognize them all. Our feet placed upon a stool and our chest pushed forward, let us pull in our elbows and keep our mouth open all the time to make the inspiration easy. Poor, dear man! How he does inhale, with what a confidence in the result! What little round eyes he has, credulous and devout, which seem to be saying to the spring:
“‘O spring of Arvillard, cure me well; see how I inhale you, see what faith I have in you—’
“Then we have the skeptic, who inhales without inhaling, his back bent, shrugging his shoulders and rolling up his eyes. Then there are the discouraged ones, the people who are really sick and feel the uselessness and nothingness of all this. One poor lady, my neighbor, I see putting her finger quickly to her mouth every little while to see if her glove is not stained at the tip with a red blot. But, all the same, people find some means to be gay. Ladies who belong in the same hotel push their chairs near to each other, form groups, do their embroidery, gossip in a low voice,discuss the newspaper of the baths and the list of strangers just arrived. Young persons bring out their English novels in red covers, priests read their breviaries—there are a great many priests at Arvillard, particularly missionaries with big beards, yellow faces, voices hoarse from having preached so long the word of God. As to me, you know I don’t care about novels, particularly those novels of to-day in which everything happens just like things in everyday life. So for my part I take up my correspondence with two or three designated victims—Marie Tournier, Aurélie Dansaert and you, great big sister whom I adore! Look out for regular journals! Just think, two hours of inhalation in four times, and that every day! Nobody here inhales as much as I do, which is as much as saying that I am a real phenomenon. People look at me a good deal for this reason and I have no little pride in it.
“As to the rest of the treatment—nothing else except the glass of mineral water which I go and drink at the spring in the morning and evening, and which ought to triumph over the obstinate veil which this horrid cold has thrown over my voice. There is the special point of the Arvillard waters and for that reason the singers and songstresses make this place their rendezvous. Handsome Mayol has just left us, with his vocal cords entirely renewed. Mlle. Bachellery, whom you remember—the little diva at your reception—has found herself so well in consequence of the treatment that after having finished three regularweeks she has begun three more, wherefore doth the newspaper of the baths bestow upon her great praise. We have the honor of dwelling in the same hotel with that young and illustrious person, adorned with a tender Bordeaux mother, who at thetable d’hôteadvertises ‘good appetites’ in the salad and talks of the one-hundred-and-forty-franc bonnet which her young lady wore at the last Longchamps races—a delicious couple, and greatly admired among us all! We go into ecstasies over the childish graces of Bébé, as her mother calls her, over her laughter, her trills, the tossings of her short skirt. We crowd together in front of the sanded courtyard of the hotel in order to see her do her game of croquet with the little girls and little boys—she will play with none but the little ones—to see her run and jump and send her ball like a real street boy.
“‘Look out, I’m going to roquet you, Master Paul!’
“Everybody says of her, ‘What a child she is!’ As for me, I believe that those false childish ways are a part of a rôle which she is playing, just like her skirts with big bows on them and her hair looped up postillon-style. Then she has such an extraordinary way of kissing that great big Bordeaux woman, of suspending herself to her neck, of allowing herself to be cradled and held in her lap before all the world! You know well enough how caressing I am—well, honor bright! it makes me feel embarrassed when I kiss mamma.
“A very singular family, too, but less amusing,consists of the Prince and Princess of Anhalt, of Mademoiselle their daughter, and the governess, chamber-women and suite, who occupy the entire first floor of the hotel and are the grand personages thereof. I often meet the princess on the stair going up step by step on the arm of her husband—a handsome gallant, bursting with health under his military hat turned up with blue. She never goes to the bathing-hall except in a sedan chair and it is heartrending to see that wrinkled and pale face behind the little pane of the chair; father and child walk at the side, the child very wretched-looking, with all the features of her mother and very likely also all of her malady. This little creature, eight years old, who is not allowed to play with the other children and who looks down sadly from the balcony on the games of croquet and the riding-parties at the hotel, bores herself to death. They think that her blood is too blue for such common joys and prefer to keep her in the gloomy atmosphere of that dying mother, by the side of that father who shows his sick wife to the public with an impudent and worn-out face, or give the child over to the servants.
“But heavens, it’s a kind of pest, it’s an infectious disease, this nobility business! These people take their meals by themselves in a little dining-room; they inhale by themselves—because there are separate halls for families—and you can imagine the mournfulness of that companionship—that woman and the little girl together in a great silent vault!
“The other evening we were together in considerable number in the big room on the ground floor where the guests unite to play little games, sing and even occasionally to dance. Mamma Bachellery had just accompanied Bébé in a cavatina from an opera—you know ‘we’ want to enter the opera; in fact, we have come to Arvillard to ‘cure up our voice for that’ according to the elegant expression of the mother. All of a sudden the door opened and the princess made her appearance, with that grand air which is her own—near her end but elegant, wrapped in the lace mantle which hides the terrible and significant narrowness of her shoulders. The little girl and the father followed.
“‘Go on, I beg of you—’ coughed the poor woman.
“And would you believe it? that idiot of a little singer must choose out of all her repertory the most harrowing, the most sentimental ballad ‘Vorrei morir,’ something like our ‘Dying Leaves’ in Italian, a ballad of a sick woman who fixes the date of her death in autumn, in order to give herself the illusion that all nature will die along with her, enveloped in the first autumnal fog as in a winding sheet!
“‘Vorrei morir nella stagion dell’ anno.’(Oh! let me pass away when dies the year.)
“‘Vorrei morir nella stagion dell’ anno.’(Oh! let me pass away when dies the year.)
“‘Vorrei morir nella stagion dell’ anno.’(Oh! let me pass away when dies the year.)
“‘Vorrei morir nella stagion dell’ anno.’
(Oh! let me pass away when dies the year.)
“It is a graceful air, but with a sadness in it which is increased by the caressing sound of the Italian words; and there in the middle of that bigdrawing-room, into which penetrated all sorts of perfumes through the open window, the little breezes, too, and the freshness of a fine summer night, this longing to live on until autumn, this truce and surcease asked of the malady took on something too poignant to bear. Without saying a word, the princess stood up and quickly left the room. In the shadows of the garden I heard a sob, one long sob, then the voice of a man scolding, and then those tearful complaints which a child makes when it sees its mother sorrowing.
“That is the mournfulness of such watering-places: these miseries concerning health which meet one everywhere, these persistent coughs scarcely deadened by the hotel partitions, these precautions taken with handkerchiefs pressed upon the mouth in order to keep off the air, these chats and confidences, the miserable meaning of which one divines from the hand moving toward the chest or toward the back near the shoulder-blade, from the sleepy manner, the dragging gait and the fixed idea of misfortune.
“Mamma, poor mamma, who knows the stages in sickness of the lungs, says that at Eaux-Bonnes or at Mont Dore it is a very different thing from what it is here. To Arvillard people send only convalescents like myself or else desperate cases for which nothing can do any more good. Luckily at our hotel Alpes Dauphinoises we have only three sick persons of that sort, the princess and two young Lyon people, brother and sister, orphans and very rich, they say, whoappear to be on their last legs; especially the sister, with that pallid complexion of the Lyon women, as if seen under water; she’s wound up in morning gowns and knit shawls, without one jewel or ribbon—not a single glimpse of coquetry about her!
“She looks poverty-stricken, that rich girl; she is certainly lost and she knows it; she is in despair and abandons herself to despair. On the other hand, in the bent figure of the young man, tightly squeezed into a fashionable jacket, there is a certain terrible determination to live, an incredible force of resistance to the malady.
“‘My sister has no spring in her—but I have plenty!’ said he the other day at thetable d’hôte, in a voice quite eaten away, which is as difficult to hear as theutnote of Vauters the diva when she sings. And the fact is, he does have springs in the most surprising way; he is the make-fun of the hotel, the organizer of games, card-parties and excursions; he goes out riding and driving in sleds, that kind of little sled laden with fagots on which the mountaineers of this country toboggan you down the steepest slopes; he waltzes and fences, shaken with the terrible spasms of coughing which never stop him for a moment.
“We have, beside, a medical luminary here—you remember him—Dr. Bouchereau, the man whom mamma went to consult about our poor Andrew. I do not know whether he has recognized us, but he never bowed—a regular old bear!
“I have just come from drinking my half-glass of water at the spring. This precious spring is ten minutes away, as one ascends in the direction of the high peak, in a gorge where a torrent all feathery with foam rolls and thunders, having come from the glacier which closes the view, a glacier shining and clear between the blue Alps that seems to be forever crumbling and dissolving its invisible and snowy base into that white mass of beaten water. Great black rocks dripping constantly among the ferns and lichens, the groves of pine and a dark green foliage, a soil in which spicules of mica glitter in the coal dust—that is the place; but something that I cannot express to you is the tremendous noise of the torrent tearing among the stones and of the steam-hammer of a lumber mill, which the water sets in action; and then, besides, in this narrow gorge, on its single road, which is always crowded, there are coal-carts, long files of mules, riding parties of excursionists and the water drinkers going and coming. I forgot to mention the apparition at the doors of wretched dwellings of some horrible male or female cretin, displaying a hideous goitre, a great big idiotic face with an open and grumbling mouth! Cretinism is one of the products of the country; it seems that Nature here is too strong for human beings and that the minerals and the rest—copper, iron and sulphur—seize, strangle and suffocate them; that that water flowing from the peaks chills them as it does those wretched trees which one sees growing all dwarfed between two crags.There’s another of those impressions made upon a new arrival, the mournfulness and horror of which disappear in the course of a few days.
“For now, instead of flying from them, I have my special pet sufferers from goitre, one in particular, a frightful little monster, perched on the border of the road in a chair fit for a child of three years old; but he is sixteen, exactly the age of Mlle. Bachellery. When I near him, he dodders about his head, as heavy as a stone, and gives forth a hoarse cry, a crushed cry without understanding and without style; and as soon as he has received his piece of silver, he raises it in triumph toward a charcoal-woman, who is watching him from the corner of a window. He is a piece of good fortune envied by a great many mothers, for this hideous creature takes in, by himself alone, more than his three brothers do, who are at work at the furnaces of La Debout. His father does nothing at all; afflicted with consumption, he passes the winter by his poor man’s hearth and in summer installs himself on a bench with other unhappy ones in the warm mist which the hot springs create as they pour forth.
“The young lady of the springs, in her white apron and with dripping hands, fills the glasses which are held out to her, as they come along, while in the courtyard near by, separated from the road by a low wall, heads are seen, the bodies of which one cannot perceive, heads thrown backward, contorted with their efforts, grinning in the sunshine, their mouths wide open; ’tis an illustrationfor the Inferno of Dante: the sinners damned to gargling!
“Sometimes, when we leave, we go the big round while returning to the establishment and descend by the country way. Mamma, whom the noise of the hotel fatigues and who particularly fears lest I should dance too much in the drawing-room, had indulged the dream of hiring a little house in Arvillard, where there is plenty of choice at every door; on every story there are bills, which flutter among the potted plants between the fresh and tempting curtains. One asks oneself what on earth becomes of the inhabitants during the season; do they camp in bands on the surrounding mountains, or do they go and live in the hotel at fifty francs a day? It would surprise me if it were so, for that magnet which they carry in their eye when they look at the bather seems to me terribly rapacious—there is something in it which glitters and catches hold.
“Yes, that same shining something, that sudden gleam on the forehead of my little boy with the goitre, reflected from his piece of silver—I find it everywhere; on the spectacles of the little nervous doctor who auscults me every morning, in the eyes of the good sugarly-sweet ladies who ask you in to examine their houses, their most convenient little gardens, crammed with holes full of water and kitchens on the ground floor to serve the apartments in the third story; in the eyes of carmen with their short blouses and lacquered hats decked with big ribbons, who make signs to you from theboxes of their carryalls; in the look cast by the donkey-boy standing in front of the wide-open barn in which long ears switch to and fro; yes, even in the glances of these donkeys, in their long look of obstinacy and gentleness, I have seen that metallic hardness which the love of money gives; I have seen it, it exists.
“After all, their houses are frightful, huddled together and mournful, having no outlook, full of disagreeable points of all kinds which are impossible to ignore, because your attention has been drawn to them in the house next door. Decidedly we shall stick to our caravansary, the Alpes Dauphinoises, which lies hot in the sun on its height and steeps its red bricks and uncountable green shutters in the middle of an English park not yet of age, a park with hedges, labyrinth and sanded roads, the enjoyment of which it shares with five or six other overgrown hotels of the country—La Chevrette, La Laita, Le Bréda, La Planta.
“All these hotels with Savoy names are in a state of ferocious rivalry; they spy upon each other, watch each other across the copses, and there is a merry war as to which shall put on the most style with its bells, its pianos, the whip-cracking of its postilions, its expenditure of fireworks; or which one shall throw its windows widest open in order that the animation there, the laughter, songs and dances shall appeal to the visitors lodged in the opposite hotel and make them say:
“‘How they do amuse themselves down there! What a lot of people they must have!’
“But the place where the hottest battle goes on between the rival taverns is in the columns of theBathers’ Gazette, where those lists of new arrivals are printed, which the little sheet gives with minute exactness, twice a week.
“What envious rage at the Laita or the Planta when, for example, they read:
“‘Prince and Princess of Anhalt and their suite, ... Alpes Dauphinoises.’
“Everything becomes colorless in the light of that crushing line. What response can there be? They rack their brains; they try their wits; if you are possessed of adeor some title, they drag it out and flaunt it. Why, here’s La Chevrette has been serving us up the very same Inspector of Forests three times under as many different species, as Inspector, as Marquis, and as Chevalier of Saints Maurice and Lazarus; but the Alpes Dauphinoises is still wearing the cockade, though you may be sure it is not on our account. Great heavens! You know how retiring mamma always is, and afraid of her shadow; well, she took good care to forbid Fanny saying who we were, because the position of papa and that of your husband might have drawn about us too much idle curiosity and social riffraff. The newspaper said merelyMesdames Le Quesnoy de Paris, ... Alpes Dauphinoises; and as Parisians are few and far between our incognito has not been unveiled.
“We are very simply arranged, but comfortably enough—two rooms on the second floor, the whole valley lying before us, an amphitheatre of mountainsblack with pine woods far below—mountains which show various shades and get lighter and lighter as they rise with their streaks of eternal snow; barren steeps close upon little farms which look like squares in green and yellow and rose, among which the haycocks look no larger than bee-hives.
“But this beautiful landscape does little to keep us in our rooms. In the evening there is the drawing-room, in the day time we wander through the park to carry out the treatment. In connection with an existence so full and yet so empty, the treatment takes hold of and absorbs you. The amusing hour is the one after breakfast, when groups are formed about the little tables for coffee under the big lime-tree at the entrance of the garden; this is the hour for arrivals and departures. People exchange good-byes and shake hands about the carriage which is taking off the bathers; the hotel people press forward, their eyes brilliant with that shiny look, that famous sheen of the Savoyard; we kiss people whom we hardly know; handkerchiefs are waved; the horse-bells jangle, and then the heavy and crowded wagon disappears, swaying along the narrow road on the side of the hill, carrying off with it those names and faces which for a moment have made a part of our life in common, those faces unknown yesterday and to-morrow forgot.
“Others come and install themselves after their own fashion. I imagine that this is like the monotony of packet-ships, with the change of faces atevery port. All this going and coming amuses me, but poor dear mamma continues to be very sorrowful, very much absorbed, in spite of the smile which she tries to give when I look at her. I can guess that every detail of our lives brings with it for her a heartrending souvenir, a memory of the gloomiest images. Poor thing, she saw so many of those caravansaries of sick people during that year when she followed her poor dying boy from stage to stage, in the lowlands or on the mountains, beneath the pines or at the edge of the sea, with hope always deceived and that eternal resignation which she was ever obliged to show during her martyrdom.
“I do think that Jarras might have arranged to save her from the memory of this sorrow; for as for me, I am not sick, I cough hardly at all, and with the exception of my disgusting huskiness, which leaves me with a voice fit for crying vegetables in the street, I have never been so well in my life. A real devilish appetite, would you believe it? fits of hunger so terrible that I can hardly wait for a meal! Yesterday, after a breakfast with thirty dishes, with a menu more involved than the Chinese alphabet, I saw a woman stemming raspberries before our door. All of a sudden a desire seized me; two bowls full, my dear girl, two bowls full of the great big fresh raspberries, ‘the fruit of the country,’ as our waiter calls them, and there you have my appetite!
“All the same, my dear, how lucky it is that neither you nor I have taken the malady of that poor brother of ours, whom I hardly knew andwhose discouraged expression, which is shown on his portrait in our parents’ chamber, comes back to me here, when I see other faces with their drawn features! And what an odd fish is this doctor who formerly took care of him, this famous Bouchereau! The other day mamma wanted to present me to him; in order to obtain a consultation with him we prowled around the park in the neighborhood of the old, long-legged fellow with his brutal and harsh face. But he was very much surrounded by the Arvillard doctors, who were listening to him with all the humbleness of pupils. Then we waited for him at the close of the inhalation; all our labor in vain! The fellow set off walking at such a pace that it seemed as if he wished to avoid us. You know with mamma one does not get over ground fast; so we missed him again this time. Finally, yesterday morning, Fanny went on our part to ask of his housekeeper if he could receive us; he sent back word that he was at the baths to care for his own health and not to give medical advice! There’s a boor for you! It is quite true that I have never seen such a pallor as he presents; it is like wax; papa is a highly-colored gentleman by the side of him. He lives only upon milk, never comes down to the dining-room and still less to the drawing-room. Our little nervous doctor, the one whom I call M. That’s-what-you-need, will have it that he is the victim of a very dangerous heart malady and it is only the waters of Arvillard which have for the past three years permitted him to stay alive.
“‘That’s what you need! That’s what you need!’
“That is all that one can make out in the babble of this funny little man, as vain as he is garrulous, who whirls round our apartments every morning.
“‘Doctor, I don’t sleep—I believe this treatment agitates me’.... ‘That’s what you need!’ ‘Doctor, I am always so sleepy—I think it must be that mineral water.’... ‘That’s what you need!’
“What he seems to need more than anything else is that his tour of visits should be made quickly, in order that he may be at his consultation office before ten o’clock, in that little fly-box where the patients are crammed together as far out as the stairs and down the steps as far as the curb-stone. And I can tell you he doesn’t loaf much, but whips you off a prescription without stopping for one moment his jumping and prancing, like a bather who is trying to get his ‘reaction.’
“O, yes, that reaction! That’s another story, too. As for me, I shall take neither baths nor douches, so I don’t make my reaction, but I remain sometimes a quarter of an hour under the lindens of the park, looking at the march up and down of all these people who walk with long, regular steps and a deeply absorbed look, passing each other without saying one word. My old gentleman of the inhalation hall, the man who tries to propitiate the springs, carries on this exercise with the same punctuality and conscientiousness.At the entrance to the shaded walk he comes to a full stop, shuts his white umbrella, turns down the collar of his coat, looks at his watch, and—forward, march! Each leg stiff, elbows to his side, one, two! one, two! as far as the long pencil of white light which the absence of a tree, forming there an opening, throws across the alley at that point. He never goes farther than that, raises his arms three times as if he had dumb-bells in his hands, then returns in the same fashion, brandishes dumb-bells once more, and does this for fifteen turns, one after the other. I have an idea that the department for the crazy people at Charenton must have somewhat the same features that my alley presents about eleven o’clock in the morning.”
6 August.
“So it is true, after all, Numa is coming to see us? O, how delighted I am! how delighted I am! Your letter has just come by the one o’clock mail which is distributed at the office of the hotel. It is a solemn moment which is decisive of the hue and color of the entire day. The office is crammed and people arrange themselves in a semicircle around fat Mme. Laugeron, who is very imposing in her morning gown of blue flannel, whilst in her authoritative voice with a bit of manner in it, the voice of a former lady’s companion, she reads off the many-colored addresses of the mail. At the call each one advances, and it is my duty to tell you that we put a certain amount of personal pride in having a big mail. In what does one notshow some personal pride, for the matter of that, during this perpetual rubbing shoulders of vanities and of follies? Just to think that I should reach the point of being proud of my two hours of inhalation!
“‘The Prince of Anhalt—M. Vasseur—Mlle. Le Quesnoy—’ Deceived again! it is only my fashion journal. ‘Mlle. Le Quesnoy—’ I give a glance to see if there is nothing more for me and skip with your dear letter away down to the end of the garden, where there is a bench surrounded by big walnuts.
“Here it is—this is my own bench, the corner where I go to be alone in order to dream and build my Spanish castles; for it is a singular thing that in order to invent well and to develop oneself intellectually according to the precepts laid down by M. Baudouy, I do not need very wide horizons. If my landscape is too big, I lose myself in it, I scatter myself, ’tis all up with me. The only bore about my bench is the neighborhood of the swing, where that little Bachellery girl passes half her day in letting herself be swung into space by the young man who believes in having springs. I should think he must have plenty of spring in order to push her that way by the hour together; at every moment come babyish cries and musical roulades: ‘Higher, higher yet, a little more—’
“Heavens! How that girl does get on my nerves! I wish that swing would pass her off and up into a cloud and that she would never come back again!
“Things are so nice upon my bench, so far away, when she is not there! I have thoroughly enjoyed your letter, the postscript of which made me utter a cry of delight.
“O, blessed be Chambéry and its new college and that corner-stone to be laid, which brings the Minister of Public Instruction into our district. He will be very comfortable here for the preparation of his speech, either walking about our shady alley, the ‘reaction alley,’ (come, that wasn’t bad for a pun!) or else beneath my walnuts, when Miss Bachellery is not scaring them with her cries. My dear Numa! I get on so well with him; he is so lively, so gay! How we shall chat together about our Rosalie and the serious motive which prevents her from travelling at this time—O great Heavens, that was a secret!—and poor mamma, who has made me swear so often about it! she is the one who will be glad enough to see dear Numa again. On this occasion she quite lost every sort of timidity or modesty; you ought to have seen the majesty with which she entered the office of the hotel in order to take an apartment for her son-in-law, the Minister! O, what fun, the face of our landlady hearing this news!
“‘Why—what—my ladies, you are—you were—?’
“‘Yes, we were—yes, we are—’
“Her broad face turned lilac and poppy-colored—a very palette for an impressionist painter. And so with M. Laugeron and the entire hotel service. Since our arrival we have been demanding an extracandlestick in vain; now there are five on the chimneypiece. I can promise you that Numa will be well served and installed; they will give him the first story, occupied by the Prince of Anhalt, which will be vacant in three days. It appears that the waters of Arvillard are bad for the princess; and even the little doctor himself believes it is better that she should leave as quickly as possible. That is what is best—because if a tragedy should occur the Alpes Dauphinoises would never recover from the blow.
“It is really pitiable, the hurry there is about the departure of these wretched people, the way they edge them off, the way they shove them along in consequence of that magnetic hostility which places seem to exhale where a person is no longer wanted. Poor Princess of Anhalt, whose arrival here was made such a festival! a little more and they would have her conducted to the borders of the department between two policemen—that is the hospitality of watering places!
“And by the way, how about Bompard? You haven’t told me whether he is coming too or not. Dangerous Bompard! If he should come I am quite capable of eloping with him on some glacier. What intellectual development might we not discover between us, as we approached the snowy peaks! I laugh, I am so delighted—and I go on inhaling, a little embarrassed, it is true, by the neighborhood of that terrible Bouchereau, who has just come in and seated himself two seats away from me.
“What an obdurate air he has, that man, to be sure! His hands crossed on the knob of his cane and chin resting on his hands, he talks away in a high voice, looking straight ahead, without really speaking to anybody. Do you suppose that I must take it as a lesson for me, what he says of the lack of prudence among the ladies who bathe, about their gowns of thin linen, about the folly of going out of doors after dinner in a country where the evenings are mortally cold? Horrid man, one would believe he is aware that I propose this evening to beg for charities at the Arvillard church in aid of the work of the propaganda! Father Olivieri is to describe from the pulpit his missionary trips into Thibet, his captivity and martyrdom, while Mlle. Bachellery will sing the ‘Ave Maria’ of Gounod, and I am going to have the greatest fun on our return to the hotel, marching through all the little dark streets by lantern-light, just like a regular ‘retreat’ with torches.
“If that is a consultation on my health which M. Bouchereau was giving me, I don’t want it; it is too late. In the first place, my very dear sir! I have full permission from my little doctor, who is far more amiable than you are and has even allowed me to take a turn at a waltz in the drawing-room at the close. Oh, only a little one, of course; besides, if I dance a little too much, everybody goes for me! They do not understand that I am robust, notwithstanding a figure like a long lead-pencil and that a Parisian girl never gets ill from dancing too much. ‘Look out now—don’ttire yourself too much.’ This woman will bring me up my shawl, that man will close the window at my back for fear that I should catch cold; but the most interested of all is the youth with springs, because he has discovered that I have a devilish deal more springs than his sister.
“Poor girl, that would not be difficult! Between you and me, I believe that, rendered desperate by the frigidity of Alice Bachellery, this young gentleman has retired upon me and proposes to make love to me—but alas, how he loses his labor; for my heart is taken, it is all Bompard’s!—O, well, after all, no, it isnotBompard’s, and you know that too. The personage in my romance is not Bompard, it is—it is—ha, ha! so much the worse for you! my hour is up; I will tell you some other day, Miss Haughtiness!”