"Mon Dieu! Mademoiselle Bathilde, you wish then to kill this poor young man with grief? This whole morning he has not moved from his window, and looks so sad that it is enough to break one's heart."
"What does his looking sad matter to me? What has he to do with me? I do not know him. I do not even know his name. He is a stranger, who has come here to stay for a few days, and who to-morrow may go away again. If I had thought anything of him I should have been wrong, Nanette; and, instead of encouraging me in a love which would be folly, you ought, on the contrary—supposing that it existed—to show me the absurdity and the danger of it."
"Mon Dieu! mademoiselle, why so? you must love some day, and you may as well love a handsome young man who looks like a king, and who must be rich, since he does not do anything."
"Well, Nanette, what would you say if this young man who appears to you so simple, so loyal, and so good, were nothing but a wicked traitor, a liar!"
"Ah, mon Dieu! mademoiselle, I should say it was impossible."
"If I told you that this young man who lives in an attic, and who shows himself at the window dressed so simply, was yesterday at Sceaux, giving his arm to Madame de Maine, dressed as a colonel?"
"I should say, mademoiselle, that at last God is just in sending you some one worthy of you. Holy Virgin! a colonel! a friend of the Duchesse de Maine! Oh, Mademoiselle Bathilde, you will be a countess, I tell you! and it is not too much for you. If Providence gave every one what they deserve, you would be a duchess, a princess, a queen, yes, queen of France; Madame de Maintenon was—"
"I would not be like her, Nanette."
"I do not say like her; besides, it is not the king you love, mademoiselle."
"I do not love any one, Nanette."