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After breakfast we had about an hour of salon before starting for the regular tournée de propriétaire through park and gardens. The three ladies Mme. A., her daughter, and daughter-in-law had beautiful work. Mme. The Catholic priests have all sorts of vestments which they wear on different occasions; purple in Lent, red on any martyr's fête, white for all the fêtes of the Virgin.
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."
"Madame," he said, "I wish to see Monsieur le propriétaire." The dame de comptoir looked very uneasy. "If Monsieur has any complaint to make," she said, "he can make it to me." "Madame, I have none." "Or if it has reference to the ordering of a dinner...." Müller smiled loftily. "Dinner, Madame," he said, with a disdainful gesture, "is but one of the accidents common to humanity. A trifle!
No wonder the trickstress would not be escorted to the station she never went to the station. No wonder she would not sell the royal secrets to the journalist there were none to sell. Oh! it was all of a piece. "If I were you I should go to the bureau of police!" said Madame la Propriétaire. Yes, she would go; the wretch should be captured, should be haled to gaol.
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.
We were obliged to make le tour du proprietaire, and, of course, as there was no other place to take us to, we went to the stables. They had their names painted in blue and white over their respective heads, but they had no crowns. Then the Count appeared in very nice clothes. I fancy, while we had been admiring Stella and Bella, he had been changing his boots.
And the endurance on Madame Dépine's round face became more vindictive, and gentler grew the resignation on the angular visage of Madame Valière. "Tiens! Madame Dépine, one never sees you now." Madame la Propriétaire was blocking the threshold, preventing her exit. "I was almost thinking you had veritably died of Madame Valière's cough."
A moment later they dashed into the court of the hotel and the driver with a loud cry of "Oo-ah!" and a crack of his whip drew up before the entrance. The portiere and the padrone, or landlord the latter being also the proprietaire came out to greet them, extending to their guests a courteous welcome. The house was very full.
There appears to be a slight coolness, as it were, between le proprietaire and me after this incident, probably owing to the intellectual standard of each becoming somewhat lowered in the other's estimation in consequence of it.
The next day the little café across the street from the humble Hôtel de la République was the richer by a generous gold piece, and the rubicund propriétaire marvelled to his equally rubicund wife over the peculiar habits of the Englishman, who preferred to drink much black coffee and smoke many black cigars sitting at the little table in the doorway, rather than see the beautiful cathedral, as did all the other tourists.
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