“Sixteen long months! Sixteen dreary months you have been gone!” says Aimee, when they are again together at the cottage in the Rue Vivienne.
“They are over, little one,” he replies, “over, never to return. Aside from being separated from you, which is to be separated from the sun” —here he caresses her red-gold hair—“they were the sixteen months most miserable of my life.”
CHAPTER XXVII—THE HOUSE IN THE RUE TOURNON
And now dawn many days of love and peace and plenty for Admiral Panl Jones, days in the midst of friends, glad days made sumptuous by a beautiful woman, who is a king’s daughter crowned with a wealth of red-gold hair. He has his business, too, and embarks in speculation; wherein he shows himself as much a sailor of finance as of the sea. The imperial Catherine refuses to lose him; but pays to the last like an Empress, bidding him prolong his vacation while he will. He grows rich. He has twelve thousand pounds in the bank; while in America, Holland, Denmark, Belgium and England his interests flourish. He sells his plantation by the Rappahannock for twenty-five hundred dollars—less than a dollar an acre; for he says that he has no more heart to own slaves, and the plantation cannot be worked without them.
The little happy cottage in the Rue Vivienne grows small; neither is it magnificent enough for his Aimee, of whom each day he grows more proud and fond. So he removes, bag and baggage, to a mansion in the Rue Tournon. There the rooms are grand, ceilings tall, fireplaces hospitably wide.
The wide fireplaces will do for winter; just now he swings a hammock in the back garden, which is thick-sown of trees and made pleasant by a plushy green May carpet of grass. Here he lolls and reads and receives his friends. For the careful Aimee counsels rest, and much staying at home; because he is a long shot from a hale man, having been broken with that fever in the West Indies, and in no wise restored by the mists and the miasmas of the Dnieper marshes.
Through the summer the back garden is filled with chairs, and the chairs are filled by friends. In the autumn, and later when winter descends with its frosts, the chairs and the incumbent friends gather in a semicircle about the wide flame-filled crackling fireplaces. There be times when the wine passes; and the freighted mahogany sideboards discover that they have destinies beyond the ornamental.
French politics bubbles and then boils; Paris is split by faction. Mirabeau controls the Assembly; Lafayette has the army under his hand—a weak, vacillating hand! These two are of the Moderates.