CHAPTER VTHE EARTHQUAKE
THIS rosy vision of Boury with her duke lasted Trimousette just twenty-four hours. The duke, on reflection, concluded that Boury was too far away from Paris, where all was tumult and uncertainty. It was not too far away from Madame de Valençay, of whom the duke was now almost weary, but for him to go to Brittany might look as if he were running away from their Majesties, who were in very great danger. So, the next evening, the duke againcame into Trimousette’s little room and told her it was not Boury to which they would go, but Belgarde, near to Versailles. He even condescended to give his reasons. Trimousette listened with a mute, unmoved face. She was so used to disappointments that she took them without protest. Of course, she thought the real reason was Madame de Valençay, and when the duke left the room, she went and looked at herself in the mirror.
“No, Trimousette,” she said to herself, “you are not pretty; your eyes are dark, and you have long, soft, black hair, and little feet. But that is not beauty. Nor is the love of the most splendid duke in France for you, although you may be his wife.”
The duke invited a great party to spend the week at the château, and the little duchess went soberly through her duties as hostess. Everybody said she was much too quiet, which was true. Others said she had no feeling, which was ridiculously false.
The party was very gay. The world was rapidly turning upside down. Nobody had any money, the black clouds and red lightnings and earthquake shocks were bewildering men’s minds, so the only thing to do was to laugh, to dance, to sing.
That is what the company at the Château de Belgarde did, the duke leading all the wild spirits in the party.
The one comfort the little duchess had was that her brother Victor was among the roysterers. He was ever kind to her, but like her husband, a trifle careless. Victor was working night and day at a little play, to be produced in the private theatre at Belgarde. It was meant to shadow forth the final triumph of the aristocracy over the people, who were making themselves to be seen and heard and felt at every turn. The play was to be produced on the night before the party broke up.
Now, it was the fixed and grim determinationof the duke that Madame de Valençay should not track him to Belgarde, to worry him. But the lady was too clever for him. He could not prevent her from visiting a neighboring château, and coming over with a large party to spend the day at Belgarde, as country neighbors do everywhere.
Never had Madame de Valençay looked more deliciously seductive than on that day. She might have sat for one of Botticelli’s nymphs in her soft wine draperies without a hoop, being in the country, her long fair hair in curls about her shoulders, and wearing a hat crowned with roses.
In contrast to this dazzling creature was the pale little duchess sombrely dressed, her silence, which verged on awkwardness, placing her at the greatest disadvantage beside the brilliant, rippling talk of Madame de Valençay and her laughter like the music of a fountain.
In one thing only did the duchess carry offthe palm. Madame de Valençay, like a peacock, was all beauty except her feet, which were large and ill-shaped. The duchess’s small, arched feet looked smaller than ever in the dainty black shoes with black silk stockings which she wore.
Trimousette had shown no sign of chagrin when Madame de Valençay arrived with a merry party, all laughing and chattering like so many birds in spring. It was a part of her reticent pride to make no complaint, to show no uneasiness. The duke was furiously angry with Madame de Valençay for hunting him down, but she was so beautiful, she tripped up and down the terrace with such airy grace, she was so wickedly merry at his expense, that, manlike, he forgave her.
This week, which Trimousette had pictured to herself as so charming, turned out to be one of the most trying of her life. She scarcely saw her duke except in the evening when the saloons were full of persons, andthere was much fiddling and dancing. Nor did she see much more of Victor, who was keen about his play. The very last evening of all it was produced and was a huge success. By some sort of hocus-pocus, Madame de Valençay had forced herself into the cast, and made a divinely beautiful marquise, to whom the duke, as a soldier of fortune, made violent love and made it well, too, his duchess looking on with a face composed, almost dull. Victor himself was disguised most bewitchingly as a ragpicker, and in his character denounced the aristocracy furiously, to the uproarious delight of his audience.
It was the most amusing thing in the world, and all the fine ladies and gentlemen nearly died of laughing at it. The heart of the young duchess alone did not respond to this ridicule of the earthquakes and the storm clouds. She remembered the words of the washerwomen and the cooks, and the strange glare in their eyes and their pinched faces.
The gayety of the party lasted until midnight, when the ball after the play and the supper was nearly over. Then a messenger, pale and breathless with hard riding from Paris, arrived on a spent horse, and told how the people had gone to Versailles and had carried the king and queen and their children and Madame Elizabeth off to Paris. How the king, foolish and shamefaced, had appeared on the balcony of the Tuileries with the red cap of liberty on his head, and how the royal people were no better than prisoners in that palace, and that Paris had gone mad.
There were no cowards among this party at the Château of Belgarde except Madame de Valençay. Much as she loved the duke, she loved her own skin better, and privately resolved to seek shelter in England until the shower was over, not knowing it to be the deluge.
The duke, who had not a drop of coward’s blood in him, started for Paris at daylight.He took his duchess with him, not that he particularly cared for her society, but because it did not enter his rash head that anybody should be afraid of anything. So to Paris they went, and on the next night the duke was visited by a deputation of rapscallions calling themselves the National Guard, thrust into a wretched hackney coach with a ruffian on each side of him, and cast into the prison of the Temple as a conspirator against the liberties of the people.