“Ménicle, the banquette!” then she took up again on the pitch of a frenzy of grief the story of the virtues of Mlle. Le Quesnoy, calling with loud cries upon heaven and its angels to know why they had not taken her in place of that child and shaking Numa’s arm with her explosions of sorrow; for she was leaning on him in order to reach her old coach at the slow gait of a funeral procession.
The horses advanced slowly under the leafless trees of the Avenue Berchère in a whirlwind of branches and dry bits of bark which the mistral was scattering as a poor sort of welcome before the illustrious traveller. At the end of the road where the porters had formed the habit of taking the horses out Ménicle was obliged to crack his whip many times, so surprised at this indifference for the great man did the horses seem to be. As for Roumestan, he was only thinking of the horrible news which he had just learned, and holding the two doll hands of his aunt, who kept constantly drying her eyes, he gently asked: “When did it happen?”
“What happen?”
“When did she die, the poor little dear?”
Aunt Portal bounced up on her thick cushions:
“Die?—Bou Diou!—who ever told you that she was dead?”
Then she added at once with a deep sigh:
“Only, péchère, she will not be here for long.”
Ah, no, not for very long, for now she no longer got up, never leaving the lace-covered pillows, on which from day to day her little thin head became less and less recognizable, painted as it was on the cheek-bones with a burning red cosmetic, whilst the eyes and nostrils were outlined in blue. With her ivory-white hands lying on the linen of the bed-clothes and a little hand-glass and comb near her to arrange from time to time her beautiful brown hair, she lay for hours without a word because of the wretched roughness that had invaded her voice, her look lost off there on the tips of the trees and in the brilliant sky over the old garden of the Portal mansion.
That evening her dreamy immobility lasted so long while the flames of the setting sun reddened all the chamber that her sister grew anxious: