Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was soon after my connexion with that abominable Marquis de Firmin-Latour that I first made the acquaintance of the present Mme. Ratichon, under somewhat peculiar circumstances. I remember it was on the first day of April in the year 1817 that M. Rochez Fernand Rochez was his exact name came to see me at my office in the Rue Daunou, and the date proved propitious, as you will presently see.
"Then listen, will you?" he went on curtly, "and pray do not interrupt. Only speak in answer to a question from me." I bowed my head in silence. Thus must the proud suffer when they happen to be sparsely endowed with riches. "You have no doubt heard of Mlle. Goldberg," M. Rochez continued after a moment's pause, "the lovely daughter of the rich usurer in the Rue des Médecins."
I had left Rochez and his barouche in the Rue des Pipots, about a hundred metres from the angle of the Passage Corneille, and it was along those hundred metres of a not altogether unfrequented street that he expected me presently to carry a possibly screaming and struggling burden in the very teeth of a gendarmerie always on the look-out for exciting captures. No, Sir; that was not to be!
Mademoiselle Leah blushed and the ogre frowned. Sir, she was an ogre! bony and angular and hook-nosed, with thin lips that closed with a snap, and cold grey eyes that sent a shiver down your spine! Rochez introduced me to her, and I made myself exceedingly agreeable to her, while my friend succeeded in exchanging two or three whispered words with his inamorata.
If, as indeed I gravely suspected, it was Fernand Rochez who had striven thus to put a spoke in the wheel of my good fortune, he would certainly not have laughed when I drove triumphantly away with my conquered bride by my side. And, of course, my ears must have deceived me when they caught the sound of a girl's merry laugh mingling with the more ribald one of the man.
Word Of The Day