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First Fecamp passed before them, then all the Norman seaside places: Saint-Pierre, the Petits Dalles, Veulettes, Saint-Valery, Veules, Quiberville. Lupin kept on jesting and Isidore never wearied of watching and listening to him, amazed as he was at the man's spirits, at his gaiety, his mischievous ways, his careless chaff, his delight in life. He also noticed Raymonde.
When we thought that we had done enough French for the day, a shrill young voice would pipe out, "Now, Moosoo, please tell us how you and all the Belgians ran away from the Battle of Waterloo." It never failed to achieve the desired end. "Ah! tas de petits sacripants!
In the Vergnès air at any rate I seem myself to have sat unscathed and unterrified not alarmed even by so much as a call to the blackboard; only protected by my insignificance, which yet covered such a sense of our dusky squalor. Queer for us the whole affair, assuredly; but how much queerer for the poor petits pays chauds who had come so far for their privilege.
It was a series of triumphs at which no one was more surprised than herself, and they were all due, she modestly says, "to a few mediocre dinners and some petits soupers."
I knew the windows of his petits appartements as what good American did not? and I wondered if he was just then taking a little supper, if he had bidden good-night to Eugenie, if he was alone in his room, reflecting upon his grandeur and thinking what suit he should wear on the morrow in his ride to the Bois.
Dora was almost always taken up by visitors, and he had scarcely any direct conversation with her. She was there, and he was glad she was there, and she knew he was glad (he knew that), but this was almost all the communion he had with her. She was mild, exquisitely mild this was the term he mentally applied to her now and it amply sufficed him, with the conviction he had that she was not stupid. She attended to the tea (for Mademoiselle Bourde was not always free), she handed the petits fours, she rang the bell when people went out; and it was in connection with these offices that the idea came to him once he was rather ashamed of it afterward that she was the Cinderella of the house, the domestic drudge, the one for whom there was no career, as it was useless for the Marquise to take up her case. He was ashamed of this fancy, I say, and yet it came back to him; he was even surprised that it had not occurred to him before. Her sisters were neither ugly nor proud (Tishy, indeed, was almost touchingly delicate and timid, with exceedingly pretty points, yet with a little appealing, old-womanish look, as if, small very small as she was, she was afraid she shouldn't grow any more); but her mother, like the mother in the fairy-tale, was a femme forte. Madame de Brives could do nothing for Dora, not absolutely because she was too plain, but because she would never lend herself, and that came to the same thing. Her mother accepted her as recalcitrant, but Cousin Maria's attitude, at the best, could only be resignation. She would respect her child's preferences, she would never put on the screw; but this would not make her love the child any more. So Raymond interpreted certain signs, which at the same time he felt to be very slight, while the conversation in Mrs. Temperly's salon (this was its preponderant tendency) rambled among questions of bric-
Petits Choux de Bruxelles. Pommes de Terre. Pouding de Noël Rhum. Dessert. Café. Liqueurs. Vins. Champagne. Moselle. Port. Benedictine. Whisky. On the reverse page we put our battle-honours Mons, Le Cateau, Crêpy-en-Valois, the Marne, the Aisne, La Bassée, the Defence of Ypres. We beat the Staff on the sprouts, but the Staff countered by appropriating the piper.
We saw to-day the residence of the Prince de Conde, and of a long line of princes famous for virtue and talents the celebrated palace of Chantilly, made still more interesting to us by having just read the beautiful tale by Madame de Genlis, "Mademoiselle de Clermont;" it would delight my dear Aunt Mary, it is to be had in the first volume of the Petits Romans, and those are to be found by Darcy, if he be not drunk, at Archer's, Dublin.
"The Prince and Perdita have been in and out of that door, sir," he had often told me; "Marianne Clarke has entered it with the Duke of . It conducts to the famous petits appartements of Lord Steyne one, sir, fitted up all in ivory and white satin, another in ebony and black velvet; there is a little banqueting-room taken from Sallust's house at Pompeii, and painted by Cosway a little private kitchen, in which every saucepan was silver and all the spits were gold.
From time to time the crowd were silent and listened, and distant firing was heard. The groups said, "Now they are beginning to tear down the curtain." We were holding Permanent Session at Marie's house in the Rue Croix des Petits Champs. Promises of co-operation poured in upon us from every side.
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