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Updated: June 27, 2025
Valerie's last fancy was a madness; above all, she was bent on getting her group; she was even thinking of going one morning to the studio to see Wenceslas, when a serious incident arose of the kind which, to a woman of that class, may be called the spoil of war. This is how Valerie announced this wholly personal event. She was breakfasting with Lisbeth and her husband.
But to-night, as the Duke recalled the half-jesting proposal to disband the Guard, made by the Chancellor on the day of the review, and added to that hint the pregnant significance of Valerie's speech, he realised that evil days were overtaking him, that his most trusted minister had been bid for and bought by his foes, and that it now behoved him to strike out a personal policy, whereby he should secure strong friends and supporters to aid him in the coming struggle against these traitors.
She sat down before Valerie's pretty, tipped mirror and looked with some excitement at the rows of glittering toilet utensils set out before her. She was sure that Mrs. Upton found it nice to spend a great deal of time before her mirror. "It is so kind of you," she repeated. "And it will be so interesting to see how you do it.
Now, as they took their places in the quadrille, he felt that effort of speech had become a duty, if not a pleasure; and of course, he began with the first commonplace which presented itself to his mind. "Do you not think it a very pleasant ball, Mademoiselle?" "Yes," dropped, in almost inaudible reply, from Valerie's rosy lips. "And not over-crowded, as most balls are?"
He knew that Valerie's eyes dwelt on him with anxiety and that it was with a faint, forced smile that she asked him: "She doesn't think that I'll ever reach her side?" "I don't believe you ever will," said Jack.
At the same time Valerie's influence was so great that, by the middle of dinner, the Baron was tuned up to the pitch, and was all the more cheerful for having unwonted anxieties to conceal; but the hapless man was not yet aware that in the course of that evening he would find himself in a cleft stick, between his happiness and the danger pointed out by his friend compelled, in short, to choose between Madame Marneffe and his official position.
He was constantly blocked by Valerie's virtuous severity; she acted remorse, and wondered what her father must be thinking of her in the paradise of the brave.
"And if I tell you that Florimond is dead?" "When you give me proof of that, I shall believe it," the girl replied. The Marquise looked at her, her face manifesting no offence at the almost insulting words. "And if I were to lay that proof before you?" she inquired, sadly almost. Valerie's eyes opened a trifle wider, as if in apprehension. But her answer was prompt and her voice steady.
The demon soon showed his griffe, and was about to foreclose, when Duplessis came to Alain's relief; and Rochebriant was to be Valerie's dot on her marriage with Alain. The Prussian war, of course, suspended all such plans, pecuniary and matrimonial.
Valerie's dress being chiefly paid for by Crevel and the Baron, the two women saved another thousand francs a month on this. And so this pure and innocent being had already accumulated a hundred and fifty thousand francs in savings.
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