His aunt’s brow darkened above her big eyes, flaming like those of a Japanese idol.
“The landau? Avai! What for? At least you’re not going to take your wife and sister to see that player of the tutu-panpan!”
This word “tutu-panpan” so perfectly mimicked the sound of the fife and tabor that Roumestan burst out laughing, but Hortense took up the defence of the old Provençal tabor with much earnestness. Nothing that she had seen in the South had impressed her so much. Besides, it would not be honest to break one’s word to the nice boy.
“He is a great artist! Numa, you said so yourself.”
“Yes, yes, little sister, you are right; we must certainly go.”
Aunt Portal in a towering rage said that she could not understand how a man like her nephew, a deputy, could put himself out for peasants, farmers, whose people from father to son had made music for the villages. Then, in her usual spirit of mimicry, she stuck out a disdainful lip and played with the fingers of one hand on an imaginary fife, while with the other she beat upon the table to represent the tabor, taking off the tabor-player’s gestures.
“Nice people to take ladies to see! No one but Numa would dream of doing such a thing. Calling on the Valmajours! Holy mother of angels!” And becoming more and more excited, she accused them of crimes enough to make them out a brood of monsters as bloody and dreadful as the Trestaillon family, when suddenly across the table she caught the eye of her butler Ménicle, who came from the same village as the Valmajours and was listening to her lies, every feature strained in astonishment. At once she shouted to him in a terrible voice to “go and change himself quickly” and have the landau at the door at “two o’clock a quarter off.” All the rages of Aunt Portal ended in this fashion.
Hortense threw down her napkin and ran and kissed the old lady rapturously on her fat cheeks. She was in a tumult of gayety and bounded for joy:
“Come, Rosalie, let us hurry!”
Aunt Portal looked at her niece: