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As the century wore on and the vices and appetites gradually consumed the healthy tissues, there sprang up a class of monsters, most accomplished roués, consummate leaders of theoretical and practical immorality, who were without conscience. To gain their ends, they manipulated every medium—valets, chambermaids, scandal, charity; their one object was to dishonor woman.
He added, that soon after I had quitted M. le Duc d'Orleans, whilst he was walking at Montmartre ma garden with his 'roues' and his harlots, some letters had been brought to him by a post-office clerk, to whom he had spoken in private; that afterwards he, Biron, had been called by the Duke, who showed him a letter from the Marquis de Ruffec to his master, dated "Madrid," and charged him, thereupon, with this present commission.
Whoever reads the best of the recent English novels those by the author of Pelham may be able to abstract from them a tolerably just idea of English fashionable society, provided he does not forget to deduct qualities which the national self-love has erroneously claimed namely, grace for its roues, seductive manners and witty conversation for its dandies.
Along with ruined roues of questionable means of support and questionable antecedents, along with the foul and adventures-seeking dregs of the bourgeoisie, there were vagabonds, dismissed soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, sharpers, jugglers, lazzaroni, pickpockets, sleight-of-hand performers, gamblers, procurers, keepers of disorderly houses, porters, literati, organ grinders, rag pickers, scissors grinders, tinkers, beggars in short, that whole undefined, dissolute, kicked-about mass that the Frenchmen style "la Boheme" With this kindred element, Bonaparte formed the stock of the "Society of December 10," a "benevolent association" in so far as, like Bonaparte himself, all its members felt the need of being benevolent to themselves at the expense of the toiling nation.
Our present-day roues, you know, prefer their victims young, and I fancy the Princess Ziska would be too old and perhaps too clever for most of them. Personally speaking, she does not impress me as being of any particular age, but as she is not married, and is, so to speak, a maid fully developed, I am perforce obliged to call her an old maid."
She would brave it out as she had done before. "They call me Mrs. Stanton." "Is that your true name?" The Carnavons were imperious, unforgiving, and sometimes brutal. Many of them had been roues, gamblers, and spendthrifts, but none of them had ever been a liar. "No!" she answered firmly. Father Cruse settled back in his seat. The ring of sincerity in the woman's "No" had removed his last doubt.
He assured me more and more that his resolution was fixed, and thereupon I took leave of him, the hour for his soiree having arrived. The next day I learned from people to whom the roues had just related it, that M. le Duc d'Orleans was no sooner at table than he burst out laughing, and applauded his cleverness, saying that he had just laid a trap for me into which I had fallen full length.
Roues, more than all others, are exposed to that fury, and the reason is very simple: ordinary life is the limpid surface, that of the roue is the rapid current swirling over and over, and at times touching the bottom. Coming from a ball, for instance, where they have danced with a modest girl, they seek the company of bad characters, and spend the night in riotous feasting.
When the lover, in Laura Marholm's Was war es? says to the heroine, "I have never yet touched a woman," the girl "turns from him with horror, and it seemed to her that a cold shudder went through her, a chilling deception." The same feeling is manifested in an exaggerated form in the passion often experienced by vigorous girls of eighteen to twenty-four for old roués.
He assured me more and more that his resolution was fixed, and thereupon I took leave of him, the hour for his soiree having arrived. The next day I learned from people to whom the roues had just related it, that M. le Duc d'Orleans was no sooner at table than he burst out laughing, and applauded his cleverness, saying that he had just laid a trap for me into which I had fallen full length.
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