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Updated: May 27, 2025
And, pushing the "Princess" before her like a turret of defence, Madame Dépine wheeled her into the ladies' department. The coiffeur, who was washing the head of an American girl, looked up ungraciously. As he perceived the outer circumference of Madame Dépine projecting on either side of her turret, he emitted a glacial "Bon jour, mesdames." "Those grey wigs " faltered Madame Valière
"But you said one is not the dome of the Invalides," Madame Valière reminded him. "He spoke of our old blocks," Madame Dépine intervened hastily. "At our age one changes no more." Thus persuaded, the "Princess" in her turn denuded herself of her wealth of wig, and Madame Dépine watched with unsmiling satisfaction the stretchings of tape across the ungainly cranium. "C'est bien," she said.
Madame Dépine would don her ponderous gold brooch, sole salvage of her bourgeois prosperity; while, if the visitor were for Madame Valière, that grande dame would hang from her yellow, shrivelled neck the long gold chain and the old-fashioned watch, whose hands still seemed to point to regal hours.
Merely to mention the grey wig had been a vent for all this morbid brooding; to abuse Madame la Propriétaire into the bargain was to pass from the long isolation into a subtle sympathy. "I wonder if she did say one franc fifty," observed Madame Valière, reflectively. "Without doubt," Madame Dépine replied viciously. "And fifty centimes a day soon mount up to a grey wig."
"Ah!" said Madame Dépine, impressed beyond masking-point, "I suppose when one has had the habit of Courts " Madame Valière shuddered unexpectedly. "Let us not speak of it. Take a fig." But Madame Dépine persisted though she took the fig. "Ah! those were brave days when we had still an Emperor and an Empress to drive to the Bois with their equipages and outriders. Ah, how pretty it was!"
Its possession, indeed, enabled Madame Valière to loiter on the more lighted stairs, or dawdle in the hall with Madame la Propriétaire; but Madame Dépine was not only debarred from these dignified domestic attitudes, but found a new awkwardness in bearing Madame Valière company in their walks abroad.
Madame Dépine was round, and grew dumpier with age; "Madame" Valière was long, and grew slimmer. Otherwise their lives ran parallel. For the true madame of the establishment you had to turn to Madame la Propriétaire, with her buxom bookkeeper of a daughter and her tame baggage-bearing husband.
Eleven days later Madame Valière and Madame Dépine set out on the great expedition to the hairdresser's to try on the Wig. The "Princess's" excitement was no less tense than the fortunate winner's. Neither had slept a wink the night before, but the November morning was keen and bright, and supplied an excellent tonic.
Madame Dépine was for a cheap but showy article from the Bon Marché; but Madame Valière reminded her that the price-lists of this enterprising firm knocked at the doors of Tonnerre. Madame Dépine frequently wept during these discussions, reminded of her own wedding. Oh, the roundabouts at Robinson, and that delicious wedding-lunch up the tree! One was gay then, my dear.
Their only consolation had been that neither outdid the other, and so long as each saw the other's brown wig, they had refrained from facing the dread possibility of having to sell off their jewellery in a desperate effort of emulation. Gradually Madame Dépine had grown to wear her wig with vindictive endurance, and Madame Valière to wear hers with gentle resignation.
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