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His opinions were sometimes loftily expressed, but always courteously as well as firmly. Bigot never drooped a feather in face of his enemies, public or private, but laughed and jested with all at table in the exuberance of a spirit which cared for no one, and only reined itself in when it was politic to flatter his patrons and patronesses at Versailles. The business of the Council had begun.
Catholic and Protestant, Belgian and French and German, they all labored together, cheerfully and earnestly doing drudgery of the most exacting, the most unpleasant sorts. One of the patronesses of the hospital, who was also its manager ex officio, had just left with a soldier chauffeur for a guard and a slightly wounded major for an escort.
French women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, when studied according to the distinctive phases of their influence, are best divided into three classes: those queens who, as wives, represented virtue, education, and family life; the mistresses, who were instigators of political intrigue, immorality, and vice; and the authoresses and other educated women, who constituted themselves the patronesses of art and literature.
Sometimes elaborate suppers are served at the subscription dance, the money for the expenses having been appropriated from the subscription fees for the entertainment. Or simple refreshments, such as dainty sandwiches, salads, ices, cakes and punch, may be served at small, round tables. In departing, it is not considered necessary to take leave of the patronesses.
Sir Thomas Gery Cullum, being one of the early English patronesses of so-called spiritualism, to a faith in which she was "converted" by Home, whom she first met whilst travelling on the Continent. I remember hearing no little talk about him in my younger days. Thackeray's friend, Robert Bell, wrote an article about him in The Cornhill, which was the subject of considerable discussion.
Celine offered her services, and Madame Theodore sent her to fetch a loaf and a quart of wine with Abbe Rose's money. And in the interval she told Pierre how Laveuve was at one moment to have entered the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour, a charitable enterprise whose lady patronesses were presided over by Baroness Duvillard.
"Well!" exclaimed the disappointed youth, "that was hard luck. And just as I was going to say something nice, too. However, it'll keep, I suppose," and he followed the two figures the nun and the milkmaid toward the dancing platform. A veritable Rosebud was bowing on the porch to the row of unmasked patronesses, several ladies of Mrs. Kimball's set, who had volunteered to help her receive.
Indeed, the bare simplicity of my menu, had it been previously disclosed, would doubtless have disappointed more than one of my dinner-giving patronesses; but each item had been perfected to an extent never achieved by them. Their weakness had ever been to serve a profusion of neutral dishes, pleasing enough to the eye, but unedifying except as a spectacle.
A few rich townspeople have crept into the miniature Faubourg Saint-Germain, thanks to their money or their aristocratic leanings. But despite their forty years, the circle still say of them, "Young So-and-so has sound opinions," and of such do they make deputies. As a rule, the elderly spinsters are their patronesses, not without comment.
Often their discourses would relate to domestic discipline and theology. There was a certain Mrs. Pawley whose dwelling was widely celebrated as the scene of almost constant strife between herself and her husband, and who, on being asked by one of her lady patronesses if she could not do something to make matters run more smoothly, replied: "That's just what I tries to do, ma'am.
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