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Etienne, to initiate "his wife" into Paris life, varied this honeymoon by evenings at the play, where Dinah would only go to the stage box. At first Madame de la Baudraye preserved some remnants of her countrified modesty; she was afraid of being seen; she hid her happiness. She would say: "Monsieur de Clagny or Monsieur Gravier may have followed me to Paris."
She had no difficulty in finding his shop at the entrance to the Promenade du Gravier, with the lines in large gold letters, "Jasmin, Coiffeur" Miss Costello entered, and was welcomed by a smiling dark-eyed woman, who informed her that her husband was busy at that moment dressing a customer's hair, but begged that she would walk into his parlour at the back of the shop.
"He is not to return till to-morrow; who knows what may happen in the course of the night?" said Gatien. "We will know!" cried Monsieur Gravier. In the life of a country house a number of practical jokes are considered admissible, some of them odiously treacherous.
At the beginning, he said: "O my birth-place, what a concert delights my ear! Nightingales, sing aloud; bees, hum together; Garonne, make music on your pure and laughing stream; the elms of Gravier, tower above me; not for glory, but for gladness."
When Dinah saw herself condemned to six years' residence at Sancerre she was on the point of accepting the devotion of Monsieur le Vicomte de Chargeboeuf; but he was appointed to a prefecture and left the district. To Monsieur de Clagny's great satisfaction, the new Sous-prefet was a married man whose wife made friends with Dinah. The lawyer had now no rival to fear but Monsieur Gravier.
So by the time the visitors from Sancerre had taken their leave one by one for they had an hour's drive before them when no one remained in the drawing-room but Monsieur de Clagny, Monsieur Lebas, Gatien, and Monsieur Gravier, who were all to sleep at Anzy the journalist had already changed his mind about Dinah.
When, ten days later, Madame de la Baudraye saw in her drawing-room at La Baudraye, Monsieur de Clagny, Gatien, and Gravier, she found an opportunity of saying to each in turn: "I owe it to Monsieur Lousteau that I discovered that I had not been loved for my own sake." And what noble speeches she uttered, on man, on the nature of his feelings, on the end of his base passions, and so forth.
He was a tall, lean man, with a minatory countenance set off by terrible eyes in deep black circles, under enormous eyebrows; and his eloquence, very unlike his love-making, could be incisive. Monsieur Gravier was a little, round man, who in the days of the Empire had been a charming ballad-singer; it was this accomplishment that had won him the high position of Paymaster-General of the forces.
"No," she said, "I think there is too much display in charity done to the sound of a trumpet." "You are very indiscreet," said Monsieur Gravier. "Can there be any indiscretion," said Lousteau, "in inquiring who the happy mortal may be in whose room that basket is to stand?" "There is no happy mortal in the case," said Dinah; "it is for Monsieur de la Baudraye."
In a moment the waiting-woman, whose shape was slender, and who walked with an elegant jauntiness' meneho, as they call it," Monsieur Gravier explained in a superior tone, "a word which describes the swing which women contrive to give a certain part of their dress that shall be nameless.
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