He jumped up all of a sudden, threw down his napkin: “Off with us, té!”
“And we are going—?” asked the impassible Bompard.
“To walk by under her window just as I did twelve years ago—to this, my dear boy, is he reduced, the grand Master of the University—”
Under the arcaded way of the Place Royale, whose square garden covered with snow formed a white quadrilateral within its iron fence, these two friends walked up and down for a long while, spying out in the broken sky-line formed by the Louis XIII roofs, chimneys and balconies the lofty windows of the Hôtel Le Quesnoy.
“To think that she is over there,” sighed Roumestan, “so near to me, and yet I may not see her!”
Bompard was shivering with his feet in the mud and did not appreciate very greatly this sentimental excursion; in order to bring it to a close he used strategy, and knowing well that Numa was a soft one, in deadly fear of the slightest illness:
“I’m afraid you’ll catch cold, Numa,” insinuated he like the traitor he was.
The Southerner was struck with fear, and they quickly returned to the carriage.
She was there indeed, in that same drawing-room where he had seen her for the first time. The furniture was just the same and held the same place, having reached that age when furniture, like temperaments, cannot be renewed. Scarcely were there a few more faded folds in the fawn-colored hangings and a film over the dull reflections from the mirrors like that one sees on deserted ponds which nothing ever touches. The faces of the two old people under the two-branched candlesticks at the card-table in company with their usual partners showed likewise a little of the wear and tear of life. Madame Le Quesnoy’s features were puffy and drooping as if the fibre had been taken out of them, and the President’s pallor was still more pallid and still prouder was the revolt that he preserved in the bitter blue of his eyes. Seated near a big arm-chair, the cushions of which were still crushed down by a light weight, her sister having gone to bed, Rosalie continued in a low voice that reading aloud which she had been giving a moment before for the benefit of her sister, reading on in a low voice through the silence of whist broken by the half-words and interjections of the players.