Indeed the house, in its melancholy silence and with the Latin inscription over the door, resembled a tomb. She dried her eyes, but for that evening her gayety was gone. In vain did Cécile, who had been told that Madame D’Argenton was separated from her husband, try with minor cares to efface the painful impression of the day; in vain did Jack seek to interest her in all his projects for the future.
“You see, my child,” she said, on her way home, “that it is not best for me to come here with you. I have suffered too much, and the wound is too recent.”
Her voice trembled, and it was easy to see that, after all the humiliations to which she had been subjected by this man, she yet loved him.
For many Sundays after, Jack came alone to Etiolles, and relinquished what to him was the greatest happiness of the day, the twilight walk, and the quiet talk with Cécile, that he might return to Paris in time to dine with his mother. He took the afternoon train, and passed from the tranquillity of the country to the animation of a Sunday in the Faubourg. The sidewalks were covered by little tables, where families sat drinking their coffee, and crowds were standing, with their noses in the air, watching an enormous yellow balloon that had just been released from its moorings.
In remoter streets, people sat on the steps of the doors, and in the courtyard of the large, silent house the concierge was chatting with his neighbors, who had taken chairs out to breathe air a little fresher than they could obtain in their confined quarters within.
Sometimes, in Jack’s absence, Ida, tired of her loneliness, went to a little reading-room kept by a certain Madame Lévèque. The shop was filled with mouldy books, was literally obstructed by magazines and illustrated papers, which she let for a sou a day.
Here lived a dirty, pretentious old woman, who spent her time in making a certain kind of antiquated trimming of narrow, colored ribbons.
It seems that Madame Lévèque had known better days, and that under the first empire her father was a man of considerable importance. “I am the godchild of the Duc de Dantzic,” she said to Ida, with emphasis. She was one of the relics of past days, such as one finds occasionally in the secluded corners of old Paris. Like the dusty contents of her shop, her gilt-edged books torn and incomplete, her conversation glittered with stories of past splendors. That enchanting reign, of which she had seen but the conclusion, had dazzled her eyes, and the mere tone in which she pronounced the titles of that time evoked the memory of epaulettes and gold lace. And her anecdotes of Josephine, and of the ladies of the court! One especial tale Madame Lévèque was never tired of telling: it was of the fire at the Austrian embassy, the night of the famous ball given by the Princess of Schwartzenberg. All her subsequent years had been lighted by those flames, and by that light she saw a procession of gorgeous marshals, tall ladies in very low dresses, with heads dressed à la Titus or à la Grecque, and the emperor, in his green coat and white trousers, carrying in his arms across the garden the fainting Madame de Schwartzenberg.
Ida, with her passion for rank, delighted in the society of this half-crazed old creature, and while the two women sat in the dark shop, with the names of dukes and marquises gliding lightly from their tongues, a workman would come in to buy a paper for a sou, or some woman, impatient for the conclusion of some serial romance, would come in to ask if the magazine had not yet arrived, and cheerfully pay the two cents that would deprive her, if she were old, of her snuff, and, if she were young, of her radishes for breakfast.
Occasionally Madame Lévèque passed a Sunday with friends, and then Ida had no other amusement than that which she derived from turning over a pile of books taken at hazard from Madame Lévèque’s shelves. These books were soiled and tumbled, with spots of grease and crumbs of bread upon them, showing that they had been read while eating. She sat reading by the window,—reading until her head swam. She read to escape thinking. Singularly out of place in this house, the incessant toil that she saw going on about her depressed her, instead of, as with her son, exciting her to more strenuous exertions.