“Like a hair in a frost,” said Monsieur de Clagny.
“So those are the airs you affect?”1 retorted Lousteau.
“What can he mean?” asked Madame de Clagny, puzzled by this vile pun.
“I seem to be walking in the dark,” replied the Mayoress.
“The jest would be lost in an explanation,” remarked Gatien.
“Nowadays,” Lousteau went on, “a novelist draws characters, and instead of a ‘simple outline,’ he unveils the human heart and gives you some interest either in Lubin or in Toinette.”
“For my part, I am alarmed at the progress of public knowledge in the matter of literature,” said Bianchon. “Like the Russians, beaten by Charles XII., who at least learned the art of war, the reader has learned the art of writing. Formerly all that was expected of a romance was that it should be interesting. As to style, no one cared for that, not even the author; as to ideas – zero; as to local color —non est. By degrees the reader has demanded style, interest, pathos, and complete information; he insists on the five literary senses – Invention, Style, Thought, Learning, and Feeling. Then some criticism commenting on everything. The critic, incapable of inventing anything but calumny, pronounces every work that proceeds from a not perfect brain to be deformed. Some magicians, as Walter Scott, for instance, having appeared in the world, who combined all the five literary senses, such writers as had but one – wit or learning, style or feeling – these cripples, these acephalous, maimed or purblind creatures – in a literary sense – have taken to shrieking that all is lost, and have preached a crusade against men who were spoiling the business, or have denounced their works.”
“The history of your last literary quarrel!” Dinah observed.
“For pity’s sake, come back to the Duke of Bracciano,” cried Monsieur de Clagny.
To the despair of all the company, Lousteau went on with the made-up sheet.
224 OLYMPIA
I then wished to make sure of my misfortune that I might be avenged under the protection of Providence and the Law. The Duchess guessed my intentions. We were at war in our purposes before we fought with poison in our hands. We tried to tempt each other to such confidence as we could not feel, I to induce her to drink a potion, she to get possession of me. She was a woman, and she won the day; for women have a snare more than we men. I fell into it – I was happy; but I awoke next day in this iron cage. All through the day I bellowed with rage in the
OR ROMAN REVENGE 225
darkness of this cellar, over which is the Duchess’ bedroom. At night an ingenious counterpoise acting as a lift raised me through the floor, and I saw the Duchess in her lover’s arms. She threw me a piece of bread, my daily pittance.
“Thus have I lived for thirty months! From this marble prison my cries can reach no ear. There is no chance for me. I will hope no more. Indeed, the Duchess’ room is at the furthest end of the palace, and when I am carried up there none can hear my voice. Each time I see my wife she shows me the
226 OLYMPIA
poison I had prepared for her and her lover. I crave it for myself, but she will not let me die; she gives me bread, and I eat it.
“I have done well to eat and live; I had not reckoned on robbers!”
“Yes, Eccellenza, when those fools the honest men are asleep, we are wide awake.”
“Oh, Rinaldo, all I possess shall be yours; we will share my treasure like brothers; I would give you everything – even to my Duchy – ”
“Eccellenza, procure from the Pope an absolution in articulo mor- tis. It would be of more use to me in my walk of life.”
OR ROMAN REVENGE 227
“What you will. Only file through the bars of my cage and lend me your dagger. We have but little time, quick, quick! Oh, if my teeth were but files! – I have tried to eat through this iron.”
“Eccellenza,” said Rinaldo, “I have already filed through one bar.”
“You are a god!”
“Your wife was at the fete given by the Princess Villaviciosa. She brought home her little Frenchman; she is drunk with love. – You have plenty of time.”
“Have you done?”
“Yes.”
228 OLYMPIA
“Your dagger?” said the Duke eagerly to the brigand.
“Here it is.”
“Good. I hear the clatter of the spring.”
“Do not forget me!” cried the robber, who knew what gratitude was.
“No more than my father,” cried the Duke.
“Good-bye!” said Rinaldo. “Lord! How he flies up!” he added to him-
self as the Duke disappeared. – “No more than his father! If that is
all he means to do for me. – And I
OR ROMAN REVENGE 229
had sworn a vow never to injure a woman!”
But let us leave the robber for a moment to his meditations and go up, like the Duke, to the rooms in the palace.
“Another tailpiece, a Cupid on a snail! And page 230 is blank,” said the journalist. “Then there are two more blank pages before we come to the word it is such a joy to write when one is unhappily so happy as to be a novelist —Conclusion!
CONCLUSION
Never had the Duchess been more lovely; she came from her bath clothed like a goddess, and on seeing
234 OLYMPIA
Adolphe voluptuously reclining on piles of cushions —
“You are beautiful,” said she.
“And so are you, Olympia!”
“And you still love me?”
“More and more,” said he.
“Ah, none but a Frenchman knows how to love!” cried the Duchess. “Do you love me well tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Then come!”
And with an impulse of love and hate – whether it was that Cardinal Borborigano had reminded her of her husband, or that she felt unwonted passion to display, she pressed the springs and held out her arms.
“That is all,” said Lousteau, “for the foreman has torn off the rest in wrapping up my proofs. But it is enough to show that the author was full of promise.”
“I cannot make head or tail of it,” said Gatien Boirouge, who was the first to break the silence of the party from Sancerre.
“Nor I,” replied Monsieur Gravier.
“And yet it is a novel of the time of the Empire,” said Lousteau.
“By the way in which the brigand is made to speak,” said Monsieur Gravier, “it is evident that the author knew nothing of Italy. Banditti do not allow themselves such graceful conceits.”
Madame Gorju came up to Bianchon, seeing him pensive, and with a glance towards her daughter Mademoiselle Euphemie Gorju, the owner of a fairly good fortune – “What a rhodomontade!” said she. “The prescriptions you write are worth more than all that rubbish.”
The Mayoress had elaborately worked up this speech, which, in her opinion, showed strong judgment.
“Well, madame, we must be lenient, we have but twenty pages out of a thousand,” said Bianchon, looking at Mademoiselle Gorju, whose figure threatened terrible things after the birth of her first child.
“Well, Monsieur de Clagny,” said Lousteau, “we were talking yesterday of the forms of revenge invented by husbands. What do you say to those invented by wives?”
“I say,” replied the Public Prosecutor, “that the romance is not by a Councillor of State, but by a woman. For extravagant inventions the imagination of women far outdoes that of men; witness Frankenstein by Mrs. Shelley, Leone Leoni by George Sand, the works of Anne Radcliffe, and the Nouveau Promethee (New Prometheus) of Camille de Maupin.”
Dinah looked steadily at Monsieur de Clagny, making him feel, by an expression that gave him a chill, that in spite of the illustrious examples he had quoted, she regarded this as a reflection on Paquita la Sevillane.
“Pooh!” said little Baudraye, “the Duke of Bracciano, whom his wife puts into a cage, and to whom she shows herself every night in the arms of her lover, will kill her – and do you call that revenge? – Our laws and our society are far more cruel.”
“Why, little La Baudraye is talking!” said Monsieur Boirouge to his wife.
“Why, the woman is left to live on a small allowance, the world turns its back on her, she has no more finery, and no respect paid her – the two things which, in my opinion, are the sum-total of woman,” said the little old man.
“But she has happiness!” said Madame de la Baudraye sententiously.
“No,” said the master of the house, lighting his candle to go to bed, “for she has a lover.”
“For a man who thinks of nothing but his vine-stocks and poles, he has some spunk,” said Lousteau.
“Well, he must have something!” replied Bianchon.
Madame de la Baudraye, the only person who could hear Bianchon’s remark, laughed so knowingly, and at the same time so bitterly, that the physician could guess the mystery of this woman’s life; her premature wrinkles had been puzzling him all day.
But Dinah did not guess, on her part, the ominous prophecy contained for her in her husband’s little speech, which her kind old Abbe Duret, if he had been alive, would not have failed to elucidate. Little La Baudraye had detected in Dinah’s eyes, when she glanced at the journalist returning the ball of his jests, that swift and luminous flash of tenderness which gilds the gleam of a woman’s eye when prudence is cast to the winds, and she is fairly carried away. Dinah paid no more heed to her husband’s hint to her to observe the proprieties than Lousteau had done to Dinah’s significant warnings on the day of his arrival.
Any other man than Bianchon would have been surprised at Lousteau’s immediate success; but he was so much the doctor, that he was not even nettled at Dinah’s marked preference for the newspaper-rather than the prescription-writer! In fact, Dinah, herself famous, was naturally more alive to wit than to fame. Love generally prefers contrast to similitude. Everything was against the physician – his frankness, his simplicity, and his profession. And this is why: Women who want to love – and Dinah wanted to love as much as to be loved – have an instinctive aversion for men who are devoted to an absorbing occupation; in spite of superiority, they are all women in the matter of encroachment. Lousteau, a poet and journalist, and a libertine with a veneer of misanthropy, had that tinsel of the intellect, and led the half-idle life that attracts women. The blunt good sense and keen insight of the really great man weighed upon Dinah, who would not confess her own smallness even to herself. She said in her mind – “The doctor is perhaps the better man, but I do not like him.”
Then, again, she reflected on his professional duties, wondering whether a woman could ever be anything but a subject to a medical man, who saw so many subjects in the course of a day’s work. The first sentence of the aphorism written by Bianchon in her album was a medical observation striking so directly at woman, that Dinah could not fail to be hit by it. And then Bianchon was leaving on the morrow; his practice required his return. What woman, short of having Cupid’s mythological dart in her heart, could decide in so short a time?
These little things, which lead to such great catastrophes – having been seen in a mass by Bianchon, he pronounced the verdict he had come to as to Madame de la Baudraye in a few words to Lousteau, to the journalist’s great amazement.
While the two friends stood talking together, a storm was gathering in the Sancerre circle, who could not in the least understand Lousteau’s paraphrases and commentaries, and who vented it on their hostess. Far from finding in his talk the romance which the Public Prosecutor, the Sous-prefet, the Presiding Judge, and his deputy, Lebas, had discovered there – to say nothing of Monsieur de la Baudraye and Dinah – the ladies now gathered round the tea-table, took the matter as a practical joke, and accused the Muse of Sancerre of having a finger in it. They had all looked forward to a delightful evening, and had all strained in vain every faculty of their mind. Nothing makes provincial folks so angry as the notion of having been a laughing-stock for Paris folks.
Madame Piedefer left the table to say to her daughter, “Do go and talk to the ladies; they are quite annoyed by your behavior.”
Lousteau could not fail to see Dinah’s great superiority over the best women of Sancerre; she was better dressed, her movements were graceful, her complexion was exquisitely white by candlelight – in short, she stood out against this background of old faces, shy and ill-dressed girls, like a queen in the midst of her court. Visions of Paris faded from his brain; Lousteau was accepting the provincial surroundings; and while he had too much imagination to remain unimpressed by the royal splendor of this chateau, the beautiful carvings, and the antique beauty of the rooms, he had also too much experience to overlook the value of the personality which completed this gem of the Renaissance. So by the time the visitors from Sancerre had taken their leave one by one – for they had an hour’s drive before them – when no one remained in the drawing-room but Monsieur de Clagny, Monsieur Lebas, Gatien, and Monsieur Gravier, who were all to sleep at Anzy – the journalist had already changed his mind about Dinah. His opinion had gone through the evolution that Madame de la Baudraye had so audaciously prophesied at their first meeting.
“Ah, what things they will say about us on the drive home!” cried the mistress of the house, as she returned to the drawing-room after seeing the President and the Presidente to their carriage with Madame and Mademoiselle Popinot-Chandier.
The rest of the evening had its pleasant side. In the intimacy of a small party each one brought to the conversation his contribution of epigrams on the figure the visitors from Sancerre had cut during Lousteau’s comments on the paper wrapped round the proofs.
“My dear fellow,” said Bianchon to Lousteau as they went to bed – they had an enormous room with two beds in it – “you will be the happy man of this woman’s choice —nee Piedefer!”
“Do you think so?”
“It is quite natural. You are supposed here to have had many mistresses in Paris; and to a woman there is something indescribably inviting in a man whom other women favor – something attractive and fascinating; is it that she prides herself on being longer remembered than all the rest? that she appeals to his experience, as a sick man will pay more to a famous physician? or that she is flattered by the revival of a world-worn heart?”
“Vanity and the senses count for so much in love affairs,” said Lousteau, “that there may be some truth in all those hypotheses. However, if I remain, it will be in consequence of the certificate of innocence, without ignorance, that you have given Dinah. She is handsome, is she not?”
“Love will make her beautiful,” said the doctor. “And, after all, she will be a rich widow some day or other! And a child would secure her the life-interest in the Master of La Baudraye’s fortune – ”
“Why, it is quite an act of virtue to make love to her,” said Lousteau, rolling himself up in the bed-clothes, “and to-morrow, with your help – yes, to-morrow, I – well, good-night.”
On the following day, Madame de la Baudraye, to whom her husband had six months since given a pair of horses, which he also used in the fields, and an old carriage that rattled on the road, decided that she would take Bianchon so far on his way as Cosne, where he would get into the Lyons diligence as it passed through. She also took her mother and Lousteau, but she intended to drop her mother at La Baudraye, to go on to Cosne with the two Parisians, and return alone with Etienne. She was elegantly dressed, as the journalist at once perceived – bronze kid boots, gray silk stockings, a muslin dress, a green silk scarf with shaded fringe at the ends, and a pretty black lace bonnet with flowers in it. As to Lousteau, the wretch had assumed his war-paint – patent leather boots, trousers of English kerseymere with pleats in front, a very open waistcoat showing a particularly fine shirt and the black brocade waterfall of his handsome cravat, and a very thin, very short black riding-coat.
Monsieur de Clagny and Monsieur Gravier looked at each other, feeling rather silly as they beheld the two Parisians in the carriage, while they, like two simpletons, were left standing at the foot of the steps. Monsieur de la Baudraye, who stood at the top waving his little hand in a little farewell to the doctor, could not forbear from smiling as he heard Monsieur de Clagny say to Monsieur Gravier:
“You should have escorted them on horseback.”
At this juncture, Gatien, riding Monsieur de la Baudraye’s quiet little mare, came out of the side road from the stables and joined the party in the chaise.
“Ah, good,” said the Receiver-General, “the boy has mounted guard.”
“What a bore!” cried Dinah as she saw Gatien. “In thirteen years – for I have been married nearly thirteen years – I have never had three hours’ liberty.
“Married, madame?” said the journalist with a smile. “You remind me of a saying of Michaud’s – he was so witty! He was setting out for the Holy Land, and his friends were remonstrating with him, urging his age, and the perils of such an expedition. ‘And then,’ said one, ‘you are married.’ – ‘Married!’ said he, ‘so little married.’”
Even the rigid Madame Piedefer could not repress a smile.
“I should not be surprised to see Monsieur de Clagny mounted on my pony to complete the escort,” said Dinah.
“Well, if the Public Prosecutor does not pursue us, you can get rid of this little fellow at Sancerre. Bianchon must, of course, have left something behind on his table – the notes for the first lecture of his course – and you can ask Gatien to go back to Anzy to fetch it.”
This simple little plot put Madame de la Baudraye into high spirits. From the road between Anzy to Sancerre, a glorious landscape frequently comes into view, of the noble stretches of the Loire, looking like a lake, and it was got over very pleasantly, for Dinah was happy in finding herself well understood. Love was discussed in theory, a subject allowing lovers in petto to take the measure, as it were, of each other’s heart. The journalist took a tone of refined corruption to prove that love obeys no law, that the character of the lovers gives infinite variety to its incidents, that the circumstances of social life add to the multiplicity of its manifestations, that in love all is possible and true, and that any given woman, after resisting every temptation and the seductions of the most passionate lover, may be carried off her feet in the course of a few hours by a fancy, an internal whirlwind of which God alone would ever know the secret!
“Why,” said he, “is not that the key to all the adventures we have talked over these three days past?”
For these three days, indeed, Dinah’s lively imagination had been full of the most insidious romances, and the conversation of the two Parisians had affected the woman as the most mischievous reading might have done. Lousteau watched the effects of this clever manoeuvre, to seize the moment when his prey, whose readiness to be caught was hidden under the abstraction caused by irresolution, should be quite dizzy.
Dinah wished to show La Baudraye to her two visitors, and the farce was duly played out of remembering the papers left by Bianchon in his room at Anzy. Gatien flew off at a gallop to obey his sovereign; Madame Piedefer went to do some shopping in Sancerre; and Dinah went on to Cosne alone with the two friends. Lousteau took his seat by the lady, Bianchon riding backwards. The two friends talked affectionately and with deep compassion for the fate of this choice nature so ill understood and in the midst of such vulgar surroundings. Bianchon served Lousteau well by making fun of the Public Prosecutor, of Monsieur Gravier, and of Gatien; there was a tone of such genuine contempt in his remarks, that Madame de la Baudraye dared not take the part of her adorers.
“I perfectly understand the position you have maintained,” said the doctor as they crossed the Loire. “You were inaccessible excepting to that brain-love which often leads to heart-love; and not one of those men, it is very certain, is capable of disguising what, at an early stage of life, is disgusting to the senses in the eyes of a refined woman. To you, now, love is indispensable.”
“Indispensable!” cried Dinah, looking curiously at the doctor. “Do you mean that you prescribe love to me?”
“If you go on living as you live now, in three years you will be hideous,” replied Bianchon in a dictatorial tone.
“Monsieur!” said Madame de la Baudraye, almost frightened.
“Forgive my friend,” said Lousteau, half jestingly. “He is always the medical man, and to him love is merely a question of hygiene. But he is quite disinterested – it is for your sake only that he speaks – as is evident, since he is starting in an hour – ”
At Cosne a little crowd gathered round the old repainted chaise, with the arms on the panels granted by Louis XIV. to the new La Baudraye. Gules, a pair of scales or; on a chief azure (color on color) three cross-crosslets argent. For supporters two greyhounds argent, collared azure, chained or. The ironical motto, Deo sic patet fides et hominibus, had been inflicted on the converted Calvinist by Hozier the satirical.
“Let us get out; they will come and find us,” said the Baroness, desiring her coachman to keep watch.
Dinah took Bianchon’s arm, and the doctor set off by the banks of the Loire at so rapid a pace that the journalist had to linger behind. The physician had explained by a single wink that he meant to do Lousteau a good turn.
“You have been attracted by Etienne,” said Bianchon to Dinah; “he has appealed strongly to your imagination; last night we were talking about you. – He loves you. But he is frivolous, and difficult to hold; his poverty compels him to live in Paris, while everything condemns you to live at Sancerre. – Take a lofty view of life. Make Lousteau your friend; do not ask too much of him; he will come three times a year to spend a few days with you, and you will owe to him your beauty, happiness, and fortune. Monsieur de la Baudraye may live to be a hundred; but he might die in a few days if he should leave off the flannel winding-sheet in which he swathes himself. So run no risks, be prudent both of you. – Say not a work – I have read your heart.”
Madame de la Baudraye was defenceless under this serried attack, and in the presence of a man who spoke at once as a doctor, a confessor, and confidential friend.
“Indeed!” said she. “Can you suppose that any woman would care to compete with a journalist’s mistresses? – Monsieur Lousteau strikes me as agreeable and witty; but he is blase, etc., etc. – ”
Dinah had turned back, and was obliged to check the flow of words by which she tried to disguise her intentions; for Etienne, who seemed to be studying progress in Cosne, was coming to meet them.
“Believe me,” said Bianchon, “what he wants is to be truly loved; and if he alters his course of life, it will be to the benefit of his talent.”
Dinah’s coachman hurried up breathlessly to say that the diligence had come in, and they walked on quickly, Madame de la Baudraye between the two men.
“Good-bye, my children!” said Bianchon, before they got into the town, “you have my blessing!”
He released Madame de la Baudraye’s hand from his arm, and allowed Lousteau to draw it into his, with a tender look, as he pressed it to his heart. What a difference to Dinah! Etienne’s arm thrilled her deeply. Bianchon’s had not stirred her in the least. She and the journalist exchanged one of those glowing looks that are more than an avowal.
“Only provincial women wear muslin gowns in these days,” thought Lousteau to himself, “the only stuff which shows every crease. This woman, who has chosen me for her lover, will make a fuss over her frock! If she had but put on a foulard skirt, I should be happy. – What is the meaning of these difficulties – ”
While Lousteau was wondering whether Dinah had put on a muslin gown on purpose to protect herself by an insuperable obstacle, Bianchon, with the help of the coachman, was seeing his luggage piled on the diligence. Finally, he came to take leave of Dinah, who was excessively friendly with him.
“Go home, Madame la Baronne, leave me here – Gatien will be coming,” he added in an undertone. “It is getting late,” said he aloud. “Good-bye!”
“Good-bye – great man!” cried Lousteau, shaking hands with Bianchon.
When the journalist and Madame de la Baudraye, side by side in the rickety old chaise, had recrossed the Loire, they both were unready to speak. In these circumstances, the first words that break the silence are full of terrible meaning.
“Do you know how much I love you?” said the journalist point blank.
Victory might gratify Lousteau, but defeat could cause him no grief. This indifference was the secret of his audacity. He took Madame de la Baudraye’s hand as he spoke these decisive words, and pressed it in both his; but Dinah gently released it.
“Yes, I am as good as an actress or a grisette,” she said in a voice that trembled, though she spoke lightly. “But can you suppose that a woman who, in spite of her absurdities, has some intelligence, will have reserved the best treasures of her heart for a man who will regard her merely as a transient pleasure? – I am not surprised to hear from your lips the words which so many men have said to me – but – ”
The coachman turned round.
“Here comes Monsieur Gatien,” said he.
“I love you, I will have you, you shall be mine, for I have never felt for any woman the passion I have for you!” said Lousteau in her ear.
“In spite of my will, perhaps?” said she, with a smile.
“At least you must seem to have been assaulted to save my honor,” said the Parisian, to whom the fatal immaculateness of clean muslin suggested a ridiculous notion.
Before Gatien had reached the end of the bridge, the outrageous journalist had crumpled up Madame de la Baudraye’s muslin dress to such an effect that she was absolutely not presentable.
“Oh, monsieur!” she exclaimed in dignified reproof.
“You defied me,” said the Parisian.
But Gatien now rode up with the vehemence of a duped lover. To regain a little of Madame de la Baudraye’s esteem, Lousteau did his best to hide the tumbled dress from Gatien’s eyes by leaning out of the chaise to speak to him from Dinah’s side.
“Go back to our inn,” said he, “there is still time; the diligence does not start for half an hour. The papers are on the table of the room Bianchon was in; he wants them particularly, for he will be lost without his notes for the lecture.”
“Pray go, Gatien,” said Dinah to her young adorer, with an imperious glance. And the boy thus commanded turned his horse and was off with a loose rein.
“Go quickly to La Baudraye,” cried Lousteau to the coachman. “Madame is not well – Your mother only will know the secret of my trick,” added he, taking his seat by Dinah.
“You call such infamous conduct a trick?” cried Madame de la Baudraye, swallowing down a few tears that dried up with the fire of outraged pride.
She leaned back in the corner of the chaise, crossed her arms, and gazed out at the Loire and the landscape, at anything rather than at Lousteau. The journalist put on his most ingratiating tone, and talked till they reached La Baudraye, where Dinah fled indoors, trying not to be seen by any one. In her agitation she threw herself on a sofa and burst into tears.
“If I am an object of horror to you, of aversion or scorn, I will go,” said Lousteau, who had followed her. And he threw himself at her feet.
It was at this crisis that Madame Piedefer came in, saying to her daughter:
“What is the matter? What has happened?”
“Give your daughter another dress at once,” said the audacious Parisian in the prim old lady’s ear.
Hearing the mad gallop of Gatien’s horse, Madame de la Baudraye fled to her bedroom, followed by her mother.
“There are no papers at the inn,” said Gatien to Lousteau, who went out to meet him.
“And you found none at the Chateau d’Anzy either?” replied Lousteau.
“You have been making a fool of me,” said Gatien, in a cold, set voice.
“Quite so,” replied Lousteau. “Madame de la Baudraye was greatly annoyed by your choosing to follow her without being invited. Believe me, to bore a woman is a bad way of courting her. Dinah has played you a trick, and you have given her a laugh; it is more than any of you has done in these thirteen years past. You owe that success to Bianchon, for your cousin was the author of the Farce of the ‘Manuscript.’ – Will the horse get over it?” asked Lousteau with a laugh, while Gatien was wondering whether to be angry or not.
“The horse!” said Gatien.
At this moment Madame de la Baudraye came in, dressed in a velvet gown, and accompanied by her mother, who shot angry flashes at Lousteau. It would have been too rash for Dinah to seem cold or severe to Lousteau in Gatien’s presence; and Etienne, taking advantage of this, offered his arm to the supposed Lucretia; however, she declined it.
“Do you mean to cast off a man who has vowed to live for you?” said he, walking close beside her. “I shall stop at Sancerre and go home to-morrow.”
“Are you coming, mamma?” said Madame de la Baudraye to Madame Piedefer, thus avoiding a reply to the direct challenge by which Lousteau was forcing her to a decision.
Lousteau handed the mother into the chaise, he helped Madame de la Baudraye by gently taking her arm, and he and Gatien took the front seat, leaving the saddle horse at La Baudraye.
“You have changed your gown,” said Gatien, blunderingly, to Dinah.
“Madame la Baronne was chilled by the cool air off the river,” replied Lousteau. “Bianchon advised her to put on a warm dress.”
Dinah turned as red as a poppy, and Madame Piedefer assumed a stern expression.
“Poor Bianchon! he is on the road to Paris. A noble soul!” said Lousteau.
“Oh, yes!” cried Madame de la Baudraye, “he is high-minded, full of delicate feeling – ”
“We were in such good spirits when we set out,” said Lousteau; “now you are overdone, and you speak to me so bitterly – why? Are you not accustomed to being told how handsome and how clever you are? For my part, I say boldly, before Gatien, I give up Paris; I mean to stay at Sancerre and swell the number of your cavalieri serventi. I feel so young again in my native district; I have quite forgotten Paris and all its wickedness, and its bores, and its wearisome pleasures. – Yes, my life seems in a way purified.”