THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD
During the first winter I spent in the boarding-school on the Rue de Vaugirard, the Brodard sisters were the mainstay of my life. It was not that I needed mainstaying in any of the regular classes, although we were driven like dogs by the grindingly thorough teachers, for lessons are lessons, wherever you find them, hard and tense though they may be in France, easy and loose in America. It was quite another part of our school life which routed me, the training in deportment and manners, carried on in three deadly sessions a week, by a wizened skipping old man, light and dry as a cork.
His little juiceless body was light, but everything else about him was heavy with the somber earnestness of his determination to teach us what he considered the manners of women of the world. Thrice a week we were obliged to begin those lessons by a ceremonious entry into the big salon, four by four, advancing in time to music across the bare shining desert of its waxed floors, counting furtively under our breaths, “one, two, three, four, glide, bend, recover, glide,” as we courtesied to the Directrice, “advance again, one, two, three, four, glide, bend, recover, glide,”—here we saluted the Sous-Directrice—“advance again” (I was always shaking partly with giggles at the absurdity of the whole business, partly with fear of the terrible eye of Professor Delacour), “one, two three, four, glide, bend ...” but usually at this point of my attempted bow to the Professor of Deportment I was harshly told to go back and start the whole agonizing ritual over.
That was before the Brodard girls took me in hand and, flanking me on either side, swept me forward on the crest of their perfect advance and genuflection to the coveted place of safety on the other side of the room where, in a black-robed line, the little girls who had made a correct entry awaited further instructions in the manners of the world.
The support of the three Brodard girls did not stop short when they had engineered me through the matter of getting into a room. The professor himself was not more steeped in a religious sense of the importance of his instruction than were Madeleine, Lucie, and Clotilde Brodard. The insensate inner laughter which constantly threatened to shake the lid of my decorum, was safely muffled by their whole-souled attention as we stood there, watching the elegant gestures and still more elegant immobilities of Professor Delacour, as he explained the lesson of the day.
One day we were taught how to put money into the contribution-box in church, “not with a preoccupied, bored air, nor yet with a complacent smirk, but thus, gravely, with a quiet dignified gesture.” Then he would pass the velvet contribution bag down the line, and forty little girls must each find the right expression, “not bored, or preoccupied, not yet with a complacent, self-conscious look, gravely—quietly—with dignity.”
I can still feel in the pit of my stomach the quiver of mingled terror and mirth with which at twelve years of age, I prepared to be, “not bored or preoccupied, nor yet smirking and complacent, but quiet—dignified—” I would never have lived through it if I had not been hypnotized by the Brodard girls.
Or perhaps we were required to be ladies stepping from a carriage and crossing a side-walk to enter a theater, keenly conscious of the eyes of the crowd on us; but required to seem unaware of spectators, “graceful, moving with a well-bred repose, and above all, unconscious, entirely natural and unconscious.” Then two by two, squirmingly the center of all the eyes in the salon, we crossed the imaginary sidewalk and entered the imaginary door, “quiet, graceful, above all unconscious, entirely natural and unconscious....” Do you suppose for a moment I could have escaped annihilation at the hands of our High-Priest, if Clotilde Brodard had not been my fellow acolyte, applying all her orthodox convictions to the problem set before us?
Yes, the Brodard girls were an example to us all, in and out of the class in deportment, for they were as scrupulously observant of all the rules of good behavior in daily school-life as under the eye of Professor Delacour. Any chance observer would have been sure that they were preparing to enter the wealthiest and most exclusive society, an impression by no means contradicted by the aspect of their mother, a quiet, distinguished, tailored person, who brought them to school at the beginning of the term, and once in a while made the tiresome trip from Morvilliers to Paris to see them. But the Brodards must have had some training in genuine good-breeding as well as the quaint instruction given by Professor Delacour, for they never made any pretensions to wealth or social standing—they said very little of any sort about their home life.
Two years later I spent my Christmas vacation with them, and at once I understood a good deal more about them. Young as I was—fourteen at the time—it was plain to me as it would have been to any observer, that they took their lessons in “society manners” so seriously because society manners and any occasions for using them were the only things lacking in the home where they were so comfortable, so much loved, and so well cared for. They lived on a shabby street in Morvilliers, in a small apartment, with one maid-of-all-work; and although their mother had a genius for keeping everything on a plane of strict gentility, their big, gay, roughly clad, unceremonious father was the ramping red editor of the most ramping red radical newspaper in that part of France, the center of all the anti-everything agitations going on in the region.
As used to happen in Europe, in the far-gone days, when I was fourteen years old (but not at all as it happens now-a-days) what they called ramping and redness looked very plain and obvious to an American. Most of what M. Brodard was making such a fuss about, seemed to me just what everybody at home took for granted: for instance his thesis that every man ought to earn his own living no matter how high his social position might be. I was astonished that anybody could consider that a revolutionary idea. Among other things, M. Brodard was what people would call now-a-days a feminist, expounding hotly his conviction that women should be trusted with the responsibility for the conduct of their own lives, and the earning of their own livings. These opinions found no echo at all in the serious-minded middle-class families of his town, nor indeed in his family, but they were an old story to me. I told him as much, informing him confidently from my wide experience as a child in the impecunious faculty of a western State-University, that everybody in America expected as a matter of course to earn his and her own living—everybody! He accepted this as unquestioningly as I advanced it, with the fresh faith and enthusiasm which upheld him in all the generous quixotism of his life. I believe, indeed, that on the strength of my testimony he actually wrote some editorials about America in his furiously convinced style.
Of course he was the champion of the working classes as against the bourgeoisie, adored by the first and hated by the second. It was an adventure to walk with him along the narrow, cobbled streets of the musty little town. Everywhere the lean, sinewy men in working clothes and the thin women in aprons and without hats, had a quick, flashing look of pleasure to see his great frame come striding vigorously along. Everywhere the artisans stopped their work to call a hearty greeting to him, or to step quickly to meet him, full of some grievance, sure of his sympathy, and comforted by the quick flame of his indignation. And everywhere the very sight of him put a taste of green apples into the mouths of all the well-dressed people. You could see that by the sour expression of their broad, florid faces. The prosperous merchant at the door of his shop frowned, cleared his throat, and turned hastily within doors, as he saw M. Brodard come marching along, humming a tune, his hat cocked light-heartedly over one ear. The lawyer in his black broadcloth coat passed us hurriedly; the women in expensive furs stepped high, drew their long skirts about them, and looked him straight in the eye, with an expression half fear, half horror. This last made him break out into the hearty, full-throated laugh, always close to the surface with him—the laugh that was as characteristic a part of him as the shape of his nose.
I understood now why Mme. Brodard sent the girls away to school. They would have been outcasts in any bourgeoise school in their own town. Yet M. Brodard was a great champion of the public schools and never lost an opportunity of defending against their bitter critics the public lycées for girls, then just struggling into being in France. I wondered a little that he should allow his daughters to go to such a boarding-school as ours. But it seemed that the angry resistance of the moneyed and pious families of Morvilliers had up to that time prevented the establishment of a public lycée for girls there. This enabled Mme. Brodard to steer past another dangerous headland in the complicated course of her life. Perhaps, also, warm-hearted M. Brodard was not inclined to be too hard on his girls, whom he fondly loved, after the adoring manner of French fathers, nor to expect too much from his devoted wife in the way of conforming to his ideas.
Even at that time, poor Mme. Brodard’s life was all one miracle of adroit achievement in reconciling irreconcilable elements and effecting impossible compromises. She had married her husband when they were both young (he must have been an irresistible suitor), and before his hot-headed sympathies for the under-dog had absorbed him. Like a good and devoted French wife, she never admitted that anything her Bernard did was other than what she would wish. But she remained exactly what she had been at the time of her marriage, and although she was deeply attached to her kind and faithful husband and made the best of homes for him, she had not the slightest intention of changing a hair or becoming anything but a good bourgeoise, a devoted believer in social distinctions, in the Church, in the laboring classes as such and in their places, and above all in the excellence of owning property and inheriting money.
On this last point M. Brodard went much further than anything I had heard discussed at home, and poured out incessantly in brilliant editorials a torrent of scorn, laughter, hatred, and denunciation, upon the sacred institution of inheritance, the very keystone of the French social edifice. “How ridiculous,” he used to write on mornings when no other forlorn hope stood in special need of a harebrained charge, “that the mere chance of birth, or a personal caprice, should put vast sums of unearned wealth into the hands of a man who has not had the slightest connection with its production. Property, the amassing of wealth by a man who has had the acumen and force to produce it ... we may have two opinions about that, about whether he should be allowed to keep for himself all he can lay his hands on. But there can be no two opinions about the hilarious idiocy of the theory that his grown-up son has any inherent right to possess that wealth, his son who has no more to do with it than the Emperor of China, save by a physiological accident. A hundred years from now, people will be laughing at our imbecile acquiescence in such a theory, as we now laugh at the imbecile acquiescence of whole provinces and kingdoms in the Middle Ages, passed from the hand of one master to another, because somebody had married somebody else.”
Mme. Brodard used to say resignedly, that she minded such editorials least of all. “That is a principle that will never touch our lives!” she said with melancholy conviction, for her modest dowry was the extent of their fortune and of their expectations. She herself had been an orphan and all the Brodard elders were dead, having left nothing to the family of such an enemy to society as they considered Bernard to be.
She did not complain; she never complained of anything her husband did; but it was plain to see that she thought it her obvious duty to protect her daughters from the consequences of their dear father’s ideas. The income from her dowry kept them at school and dressed them at home, and as the oldest began to approach the marriageable age Mme. Brodard cast about her with silent intensity for some possible means for stretching that dowry to enable Madeleine to make the right sort of match. She knew of course that this was an impossible undertaking; but all her married life had been an impossible undertaking carried through to success, and she did not despair, although there were times when she looked white and anxious.
But this was never when M. Brodard was at home. Indeed it was impossible for any one to be tense or distraught in the sunny gaiety of M. Brodard’s presence. His entrance into that neat, hushed, narrow, waxed, and polished interior was like the entrance of a military band playing a quick-step. He was always full of his latest crusade, fired with enthusiasms, hope, and certainty of success. He made you feel that he was the commanding officer of a devoted force, besieging an iniquitous old enemy, and every day advancing further toward victory. Yet another blast, down would tumble the flimsy walls of cowardly traditional injustice, and sunshine would stream into the dark places!
Full of faith in what he was doing, he was as light-hearted as a boy, electrifying the most stagnant air with the vibrant current of his conviction that life is highly worth the trouble it costs. Big girls as we were, he swept us off into hilarious games of hide-and-seek; and never in any later evenings of my life have I rocked in such gales of fun as on the evenings when we played charades. An impersonation of a fussy, clucking setting hen which he gave as part of the word, “ampoule” has remained with me as a high-water mark of sheer glorious foolery never surpassed by the highest-salaried clown. In the following charade we laughed so at his “creation” of a fateful Napoleon that we could not sit on our chairs; and after that, carried away by his own high spirits, he did the “strong man” at the village fair (he was a prodigiously powerful athlete) lifting a feather with a grotesque display of swelling muscles, clenched jaws, and widespread legs which all but finished me. The tears of mirth used to come to my eyes as I recalled that evening, and many a taut, high-strung moment of my adolescence in after years relaxed into healthy amusement at the remembered roar of M. Brodard’s laughter.
M. Brodard’s laughter ... alas!
And yet at the very time when his care-free, fearless laughter so filled my ears, he was standing out single-handed against the most poisonous hostility, to force an investigation of a framed-up law case, in which a workingman had been defrauded of his rights. Apparently there was always some such windmill against which he thought it necessary to charge. Apparently his zeal for forlorn hopes never diminished. We went back to school after that vacation leaving him the center of a pack of yelling vituperations from all the staid and solid citizens of the region ... “poor, dear Papa,” as the Brodard girls always said, imitating their mother’s accent.
To me, school and lessons in deportment seemed queerer than ever, after that great gust of stormy, ruffling wind, but the Brodard girls were used to such contrasts. They but plunged themselves deeper than ever, up to their very necks, into the atmosphere of gentility. They had caught more than their mother’s accent, they had caught her deep anxiety about their future, her passionate determination that the ideas of their father should not drag them into that impossible world of workingmen, radicals and badly dressed outcasts, which was the singular choice of their excellent poor dear Papa.
When Mme. Brodard came to Paris, in the well-cut tailored dress which I now knew to be the only one she possessed, she reported that Papa, by sheer capacity for shouting unpleasant truths at the top of his great voice, had obtained a re-trial and acquittal of that tiresome workingman, and was now off on a new tack, was antagonizing all the merchants of town by an exposé of their grinding meanness to their hapless employees. It seemed that libel-suits were thick in the air, and the influential members of society crossed to the other side of the street when they met M. Brodard. “But you know how poor dear Papa seems to thrive on all that!”
Well, he might thrive on all that, but Madeleine, Lucie, and Clotilde knew very well that nothing they wanted would thrive on “all that.” Their only salvation was in escape from it. In the effort to prepare themselves for that escape, they smeared themselves, poor things, from head to foot with good breeding. They had nothing but themselves, Maman, and her little dowry to count on; but at least no one should be able to guess from their manners that their home life had not been conventional. Mme. Brodard went on, that day, to consult with her banker about re-investing some of her little fortune, so that it would mean more income. When Madeleine left school, they would need more, Heaven knew, to piece out the plain living furnished by the head of the house. What could they do to rise to that crisis? When Madeleine left school ... an abyss before their feet! Could they perhaps go south, to a winter resort for a few months every year, where there were no Morvilliers people, where there might be eligible young men ... or even some not so young? They all looked anxious and stern, when they thought of it, for after Madeleine, there were Lucie and Clotilde!
I was sent home to America in June that year, before the end of the school-term. The good-bys were said at lunch-time, before my schoolmates went off to the lesson in deportment. The last I saw of the Brodards at the time, was through the door of the salon as I passed on my way to the street. They were learning how to handle a fan, how to open it—“not tearing it open with both hands like a peasant girl, but flirting it open with a sinuous bend of the wrist of one hand ... not so abrupt!... smooth, suave, with an aristocratic....” As I went down the hall, the voice of Professor Delacour died away on these words. I wondered what poor dear Papa was up to now.
Two years later when I was taken back to France and went to visit the Brodards, I found that he was still up to the same sort of thing. Just then he was making the echoes yell in the defense of a singularly unattractive, snuffy old man, who lived in a village six or seven kilometers away from Morvilliers. Old M. Duval, it seemed, had gone to South America in his youth, had accumulated some property there, and had lost his religion. Now, at sixty-nine, with so it was said, enough money to live on, he had come back to Fressy, had bought a comfortable little home there, and settled down to end his days in his birthplace. But Fressy, as it happened, had always been and still was noted for its piety and conservatism. The curé of the parish was a man of flaming zeal, and the Mayor was also a very devout ultramontane. Till then their influence had been unquestioned in the town. They had boasted that there was one loyal village left in France where none of the poisonous new ideas had come in to corrupt the working classes, and to wean them from their dutiful submission to the rule of their spiritual and secular betters. Apparently till then, M. Brodard had overlooked the existence of such a village near him.
His attention was now very much called to it by the persecution of old M. Duval. The persistent and ostentatious absence from Mass of the returned traveler was followed by a shower of stones which broke most of his windows. His easy-going advice given publicly in a café to some young workmen of the town to follow his example, to stand up for themselves, get higher wages or strike, was answered by the poisoning of his dog. The old fellow became indignant, and never dreaming of the heat of the feeling against him, walked straight up to M. le Curé one day in the street, and asked him—as if the priest had anything to do with what was happening!—whether the laws of France did or did not permit a man to live quietly in his own house, no matter what his opinions were! That night some anonymous defender of the status quo set fire to his chicken-house. It was at this time that M. Brodard began to be aware of the existence of Fressy.
Old M. Duval called on the police for protection. “The police.” That sounds very fine, but the police of Fressy meant a solitary old garde-champêtre whose wife was the most pious woman in town, and whose only daughter was the cook in the house of the fiercely legitimatist Mayor. It is not surprising that the next morning, the scoffing unbeliever from overseas found that somehow marauders had eluded “the police,” and laid waste his promising kitchen-garden. They intended (they proclaimed it openly) to drive out from their sanctified midst, the man who flaunted his prosperity as the result of a wicked and godless life.
But they had not counted on M. Brodard and on his unparalleled capacity for making a noise. He stormed out to Fressy to see the old man, thoroughly frightened by this time; heard his story, exploding at intervals into fiery rockets of indignation; clasped him in his arms, as though M. Duval had been his own kin; and swore that he would prove to him that justice and freedom existed in France to-day as always. The old man’s nerves were shaken by his troubled nights and his harried sense of invisible enemies all about him. Until that moment it had seemed to him that all the world was against him. His relief was immense. He returned M. Brodard’s embrace emotionally, his trembling old arms clasped hard about M. Brodard’s great neck, the tears in his scared old eyes.
Then M. Brodard hurried back to Morvilliers, tore the throttle open, and let her go ... to the great discomfort of Mme. Brodard and the girls, the two elder of whom were now very reluctantly preparing themselves to teach, for they had not been able to organize the longed-for escape. That was the situation when I visited them.
Of course in due time the intemperate publicity about the matter put an end to the attacks on M. Duval. The rattling crackle of M. Brodard’s quick-fire protests rose in the air, till they reached the ears of the Sous-Prefect, from whose exalted office orders to “see to that matter” were issued, and came with imperative urgence even to the royalist Mayor of Fressy. He very grudgingly issued certain unofficial orders, which meant quiet in old M. Duval’s life. There was even a victim sacrificed to shut M. Brodard’s too-articulate mouth. The garde-champêtre lost his position and his chance for a pension, which was very hard on an excellent, honest man whose only intention had been to do his duty as he saw it.
By the time that I was back in America in college, Clotilde wrote me that all that disturbance had died down, that M. Duval, horrid old thing, had come on his shaking old legs to make a visit to Papa, to thank him with deep emotion for the intense peace and comfort of his present life. I could read between the lines that Clotilde thought they might very well have a little more of those commodities in their own life.
After that I heard from some one else (for M. Brodard and his ideas were becoming famous) that the opposition had finally caught him in a legal technicality, something connected with his campaign for tearing down the miserable old disease-soaked medieval hovels where many poor people lived in Morvilliers. The proprietors of the threatened rookeries chipped in together, hired expensive expert legal advice, and finally, to their immense satisfaction, succeeded in getting a tiny sentence of imprisonment, for defamation of their characters, inflicted on M. Brodard. He was kept in jail for two weeks, I believe, which was a fortnight of pure glory. All his humble adherents, hundreds of them, came tramping in to see him from all the region round, bringing tribute. His “cell” was heaped with flowers, he fared on the finest game and fattest poultry, and ... what pleased him vastly more ... the fiery editorials which he sent out from his prison about the infamy of wretched lodgings for poor families were noticed and reprinted everywhere in France, where the circumstances of his grotesque imprisonment were known.
The condemnation which his opponents meant to be a crushing disgrace turned out an apotheosis. He enjoyed every moment of it and emerged from his two weeks vacation, ruddier, stronger, in higher spirits than ever, his name shining with the praise of generous-hearted men all over the country. He cocked his hat further over one ear than ever and strode off home. You could fairly see the sparks fly from beneath his feet.
* * * * * * *
The morning after his release from prison, news came from Fressy that old M. Duval had died of apoplexy.
Well, what of that? Ah, what of that ...?
He had willed his whole fortune to M. Brodard, and it seemed he was frightfully rich: it came to more than three million francs.
* * * * * * *
Oh, yes, he took it. Of course he did. You knew he would. What else would you have had him do? It’s all very well to have abstract ideas about the absurdity and iniquity of inheritance; but when your own daughters ... and your own wife ... expect so confidently....
Mme. Brodard, you see ... he was devoted to his wife who had so faithfully made the best of homes for him; and to his daughters whom he loved so dearly....
Can’t you see the astounded radiance of their faces at the news? And they’d already been sacrificed so many years for his ideas.... Ideas!
What do you suppose he could do but accept it?
* * * * * * *
I don’t know one thing about the inner history of this period when M. Brodard was bringing himself to a decision, and in the light of a glimpse, just one glimpse which I had later, I think the less I know about it the better for my peace of mind. The only information I had was contained in a very nice, conventional note from Mme. Brodard, giving me, in the pleasantly formal, well-turned phrases of French epistolatory style, the news of their great good fortune which, she said, was certainly sent by Providence to protect her dear husband from the suffering and hardship which would have been his without it; for M. Brodard was very ill, she wrote, oh, very ill indeed! He had gone through a phase of strange mental excitement; from that he had sunk into melancholia which had frightened them, and in the end had succumbed to a mysterious malady of the nervous system which made him half-blind and almost helpless. Helpless ... her wonderful, strong husband! What could she have done to care for him if it had not been for this financial windfall coming just when it was most needed?
You can imagine my stupefaction on reading this letter. It was caused as much by learning that M. Brodard was a hopeless invalid as by learning about that odd business of the fortune left them. How strange! M. Brodard with a nervous affection which left him in a wheel chair! It was incredible. I reread the beautifully written letter, trying hard to see if anything lay between the lines. But there was nothing more in it than I had already found. It was evidently written in the utmost good faith. Everything Mme. Brodard did was done with the utmost good faith.
Some years later I was in France again and found myself near the address on the Riviera where the Brodards had purchased an estate. I had not heard from them in some months, but on the chance that they might be there, I went over from Mentone on a slow way-train which, returning three hours later, would give me time to pay my call and get back the same afternoon. Everybody at the little white-stuccoed station knew where the Brodard villa was, and when he knew where I was going, the driver of the shabby cab tucked me into it with a respect for my destiny he had noticeably not shown to my very plain and rather dusty traveling-dress. We climbed a long hill-road to a high point, commanding a glorious view of the brilliant sea and yet more brilliant coast, and turned into a long manorial allée of fine cypress trees.
The house was as manorial and imposing as the avenue leading to it and I began to be uneasily aware of my plain garb. As I went up the steps to the great door I could feel the house thrilling rhythmically to excellent music, and to the delicate gliding of many finely-shod feet.
A servant led me to a small round salon hung with blue brocade, and in a moment Mme. Brodard came hurrying to meet me. She had bloomed herself luxuriantly open like a late rose, and from head to foot was a delight to the eye. Of course she was very much surprised to see me, but with never a glance at my garb she gave me the cordial welcome of an old friend. Her perfect good faith and good breeding still governed her life, it was plain to see. She was giving a thé dansant for the younger girls, she told me, adding that Madeleine had been married two months before to a silk manufacturer of Lyons. She was evidently glad to see me, but naturally enough, just for the moment, a little puzzled what to do with me! I suggested to her relief that I make a visit to M. Brodard first of all and wait to see the others till their guests had gone.
“Yes, that’s the very thing,” she said, ringing for a servant to show me the way, “he’ll remember you, of course. He will be so glad to see you. He always liked you so much.”
As the servant came to the door, she added with a note of caution. “But you must expect to find him sadly changed. His health does not improve, although we have a resident physician for him, and everything is done for him, poor dear Bernard!”
The servant in a quiet livery of the finest materials, led me upstairs over velvet carpets, and then upstairs again, to a superb room at the top of the house. It was all glass towards the miraculous living blue of the Mediterranean, and full of flowers, books, and harmoniously designed modern furniture. M. Brodard, clad in a picturesque, furred dressing-gown sat in a wheel chair, his bald head sunk on his breast, his eyes fixed and wide-open, lowered towards his great, wasted white hands lying empty on his knees. Until he raised his eyes to look at me, I could not believe that it was he ... no, it was not possible!
He remembered me, as Mme. Brodard had predicted, but the rest of her simple-hearted prophecy did not come true. He was not in the least glad to see me and made not the slightest pretense that he was. A look that was intolerable to see, had come into his eyes as he recognized me, and he had instantly turned his head as though he hated the sight of me.
I knew at once that I ought to get out of the room, no matter how; but I was so stricken with horror and pity that for a moment I could not collect myself, and stood there stupidly.
A faint distant sound of gay music hummed rhythmically in the silence. A professional-looking man who had been sitting with a book on the other side of the room got up now and, with the bored air of a man doing his duty, took hold of M. Brodard’s thin wrist to feel the pulse.
M. Brodard snatched away his hand and said to me over the doctor’s head, “Well, you see how it is with us now.” He corrected himself. “You see how it is with me.”
His accent, his aspect, his eyes added what he did not say. He had been trembling with impatience because I was there at all. Now he was trembling with impatience because I did not answer him! His terrible eyes dared me to answer.
I would have done better to hold my tongue altogether, but my agitation was so great that I lost my head. I felt that I was called upon to bring out something consoling, and heard myself murmuring in a foolish babble something or other about possible compensations for his illness, about his still being able to go on with his work, to write, to publish, in that way to propagate his ideas....
At that he burst into a laugh I would give anything in the world not to have heard.
“My ideas ... ha! ha! ha!” he cried.
Oh, I got myself out of the room then! I ran down the velvet carpets of the stairs, my hands over my ears.
As I hurried along to the outside door I passed the salon. I saw, across the bare, gleaming desert of its waxed floor, Clotilde standing with a well-dressed man. She had a fan in her hand, and, as I looked, she opened it deftly, with a sinuous bend of her flexible wrist ... “smoothly, suavely ... with an aristocratic ...”