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One morning, as I called on Coraline, he said to me, "Ah! I am very glad to see you, for I have promised the Duchess of Rufe to present you to her, and we can go to her immediately." Again a duchess! My star is decidedly in the ascendant. Well, let us go! We got into a 'diable', a sort of vehicle then very fashionable, and at eleven o'clock in the morning we were introduced to the duchess.
He considered piously the wonders of terrestrial life, a succession of accidents all foreordained by God, an apparent drifting that was in fact one steady propulsion by the hand of fate. From the rich, ancestral house of coraline limestone across the sea to strange lands. From dignity to abasement. From loneliness to this faint, delicious fragrance in which the heart dissolved.
She was the cause of my paying several visits to the Hotel du Roule, and all for her; she was very proud of my constancy. Those visits very naturally cooled my ardour for Coraline. A singer from Venice, called Guadani, handsome, a thorough musician, and very witty, contrived to captivate her affections three weeks after my quarrel with her.
I took the first hack which happened to pass, and drove straight to Patu's house, to whom I related my adventure, almost foaming with rage. But very far from pitying me or sharing my anger, Patu, much wiser, laughed and said, "I wish with all my heart that the same thing might happen to me; for you are certain of possessing our beautiful Coraline the very first time you are with her."
But Coraline managed to coax him back, and, a short time after, a reconciliation took place between them, and such a good one, that a babe was the consequence of it; a girl, whom the prince named Adelaide, and to whom he gave a dowry. After the death of his father, the Duke of Valentinois, the prince left her altogether and married Mlle. de Brignole, from Genoa.
Around her, among the gay blossoms and gayer wools, sat her four daughters, variously intent. The mother, a poetic soul, had named them musically and with dulcet rhymes: Madeline and Adeline were the two eldest, Coraline and Doraline the two youngest.
So they went down again and through the whole palace and saw the shells, some of them indeed making pearls, but all singing the same song, and the sponges that were growing and the branches of coraline that one by one loosened themselves and floated upward, singing as they rose all about her, from corals and shells and grasses and sponges and fishes, came this one song, each singing it to his own air, yet the whole melody rising and sinking in a single harmonious strain.
"But there is never anything going on," broke in Coraline, in a tone of complaint; "no parties, no going away for vacations, no anything." "Now, Cora, don't be discontented! You must not add a straw to dear Roscoe's burdens," said her mother. "Of course not, mother; I wouldn't for the world. I never saw her but that once; and she wasn't very cordial. But, as you say, she might do something.
She was the cause of my paying several visits to the Hotel du Roule, and all for her; she was very proud of my constancy. Those visits very naturally cooled my ardour for Coraline. A singer from Venice, called Guadani, handsome, a thorough musician, and very witty, contrived to captivate her affections three weeks after my quarrel with her.
The person was the Chevalier de Wurtemburg, who, without deigning to cast even one glance on me, began to say sweet words to Coraline, and thrusting his head entirely out of his carriage he whispered to her. She answered him likewise in a whisper; then taking my hand, she said to me, laughingly,