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Updated: June 16, 2025
"Monsieur Rajewski has consented to play a Chopin nocturne. And here are my two painters, Miss Adams Messieurs Bla and Maugre. They hate each other like the Jesuits and Jansenists of the good old days of Pascal." "She likes to display her learning," grumbled the marquis to Mrs. Sheldam. "That younger man, Bla, swears by divided tones; his neighbour, Maugre, paints in dots.
Sheldam talked in hesitating French to the Marquis de Potachre, an old fellow of venerable and burlesque appearance. His fierce little white mustaches were curled ceilingward, but his voice was as timid as honey. He flourished his wizened hand toward Miss Adams. "Charming! Delightful! She has something English in her insouciant pose, and is wholly American in her cerebral quality.
Ermentrude, her candid eyes now reproachful and suspicious, did not flinch as she took his hand it seemed to melt in hers but her farewell was conventional. In the street, before they seated themselves in their carriage, Mrs. Sheldam shook her head. "Oh, my dear! What a woman! What a man! I have such a story to tell you. No wonder you admire these people.
Wake up, dear; we are there," said Mrs. Sheldam, in her kind, drawling tones. Mr. Sheldam sighed and threw away the unlighted cigar he had bitten during the ride along the Champs Élysées.
The princess was pleased. "Ah, Miss Adams," she said, in idiomatic English, "you have candid eyes. You make me feel like telling stories when you gaze at me so appealingly. Don't be shocked" the girl had coloured "perhaps I shall, after a while." Mr. Sheldam had slipped into a corner behind a very broad table and under the shaded lamps examined some engravings. Mrs.
Sheldam wondered what a Superman was, and Ermentrude felt annoyed. Zarathustra was another of her gods, and this brusquely related anecdote did not seem to her very spirituelle. But she had not formulated an answer when she heard a name announced, a name that set her heart beating. At last! The poet had kept his word.
And he tells her the way they make up to him when he meets them in society." Ermentrude shivered. The princess also! And with all her warning about the Superman! Now she understood. Then she took the hand of Mrs. Sheldam, and, stroking it, whispered: "Auntie, I'm so glad I am going to Havre, going to see Charlie soon." The lids of her eyes were wet. Mrs. Sheldam had never been so motherly.
Sheldam trembled at the audacity of her niece whose irony was as much lost on her as it was on the poet. "But you publish plays and books, do you not?" Ermentrude naïvely asked. Madame Kéroulan interposed in icy tones: "Mademoiselle Adams misunderstands. Monsieur Kéroulan is the Grand Disdainer. Like his bosom friend, Monsieur Mallarmé, he cares little for the Philistine public "
Sheldam had, doubtfully, it is true, suggested the bourgeois comfort of the Métropolitain, but she was frowned on by her enthusiastic niece. What! ride underground in such weather? So they arrived at the poet's not in the best of humour, for Mrs. Sheldam had quietly chidden her charge on the score of her "flightiness."
Had she herself not gazed into this distorting glass? The tune of her life had never sounded so discouragingly faint and inutile. Perhaps she did not posses the higher qualities that could extort from a nature so rich and various as Octave Kéroulan's its noblest music! Perhaps his wife had told the truth to Mrs. Sheldam and had lied to her!
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