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Updated: June 2, 2025
"It is not that she has the cause at heart," commented Madame de Chantonnay, as she walked laboriously on Albert's arm down the ramp of the Chateau de Gemosac at the termination of the meeting. "It is not for that that she throws her note of a thousand francs upon the table and promises more when things are in train. It is because she can refuse nothing to Dormer Colville. Allez, my son!
And Madame de Chantonnay heaved a prodigious sigh, in memory of the days that were no more. "Given a young man of enterprise and not bad looking, I allow. He has the grand air and his face is not without distinction. Given a young girl, fresh as a flower, young, innocent, not without feeling. Ah! I know, for I was like that myself. Place them in a garden, in the springtime.
At this moment, Albert de Chantonnay entered the room. He was enveloped in a long black cloak, which he threw off his shoulders and cast over the back of a chair, not without an obvious appreciation of its possibilities of the picturesque. He looked round the room with a mild eye, which refused to lend itself to mystery or a martial ruthlessness.
His hermitage contained other appliances save those for study and devotion. His retired life was, in fact, that of a voluptuary. His brother, Chantonnay, reproached him with the sumptuousness and disorder of his establishment. He lived in "good and joyous cheer." He professed to be thoroughly satisfied with the course things had taken, knowing that God was above all, and would take care of all.
She looked at her fan with a gleam of ill-concealed irony and glanced over it toward Albert de Chantonnay, who, with a consideration which must have been hereditary, was uneasy about the alteration he had made in his whiskers. It was perhaps unfair, he felt, to harrow young and tender hearts. It was at this moment that a loud knock commanded a breathless silence, for no more guests were expected.
"Heaven forbid! and I a widow!" replied Madame de Chantonnay, arranging, with a stout hand, the priceless lace on her dress. "Albert is coming. We brought a lantern, although it is a moon. It is better. Besides, it is always done by those who conspire. And Albert had his great cloak, and he fell up a step in the courtyard and dropped the lantern, and lost it in the long grass.
And now, with your permission, I will return to Royan, where I have my little apartment, as you know." He looked from one to the other, with his melancholy and self-deprecating smile. "Voila," he added; "it remains for me to pay my respects to Madame de Chantonnay. We have travelled far, and I am tired. I shall ask her to excuse me." "And Monsieur de Bourbon comes to Gemosac. That is understood.
"Bon Dieu! my old friend, what do you expect?" replied Madame de Chantonnay to a rather incoherent statement made to her one May afternoon by the Marquis de Gemosac. "It is the month of May," she further explained, indicating with a gesture of her dimpled hand the roses abloom all around them.
"Oh, Juliette is sensible," replied the fond father. "My daughter is, I hope, sensible, Comtesse." "Give yourself no uneasiness, my old friend," said Madame de Chantonnay, heartily. "She is charming." Madame sat back in her chair and fanned herself thoughtfully. It was the fashion of that day to carry a fan and wield it with grace and effect.
For most men are, in the end, forced to play the part the world assigns to them. We are not allowed to remain what we know ourselves to be, but must, at last, be that which the world thinks us. Madame de Chantonnay, murmuring to a neighbour a mystic reference to her heart and its voluminous premonitions, watched him depart with a vague surprise. "Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!" she whispered, breathlessly.
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