No, the lady in blue was his sister-in-law, Mlle. Hortense, a pretty girl just out of the convent, but one, they say, who already straddled a horse just as well as a dragoon. Mme. Roumestan was more dignified, more thoroughbred in appearance, but she looked much haughtier. These Parisian ladies think so much of themselves! And so, with the picturesque impudence of their half-Latin language, the women, standing and shading their eyes with their hands, proceeded in loud voices deliberately to pick the two Parisians to pieces—their simple little travelling hats, their close-fitting dresses worn without jewelry, which were so great a contrast to the local toilettes, in which gold chains and red and green skirts puffed out by enormous bustles prevailed.
The men talked of the services rendered by Numa to the good cause, of his letter to the Emperor, and his speeches for the White Flag. Oh, if we had only a dozen men in the Chamber like him, Henry V would have been on his throne long ago!
Intoxicated by this circumambient enthusiasm and wrought up by these remarks, Numa could not remain quiet in one spot. He threw himself back in his great arm-chair, his eyes shut, his expression ecstatic, and swayed himself restlessly back and forth; then, rising, he strode up and down the platform and leaned over toward the arena to breathe in as it were all the light and cries, and then returned to his seat. Jovial and unceremonious, his necktie loose, he knelt on his chair, his back and his boot-soles turned to the crowd, and conversed with his Paris ladies seated above and behind him, trying to inoculate them with his own joy and satisfaction.
Mme. Roumestan was bored—that was evident from the expression of abstracted indifference on her face, which though beautiful in lines seemed cold and a little haughty when not enlivened by the light of two gray eyes, two eyes like pearls, true Parisian eyes, and by the dazzling effect of the smile on her slightly open mouth.
All this southern gayety, made up of turbulence and familiarity, and this wordy race all on the outside and the surface, whose nature was so much the opposite of her own, which was serious and self-contained, grated on her perhaps unconsciously, because she saw in them multiplied and vulgarized the same type as that of the man at whose side she had lived ten years, whom she had learned to know to her cost. The glaring hot blue sky, so excessively brilliant and vibrating with heat, was also not to her liking. How could these people breathe? Where did they find breath enough to shout so? She took it into her head to speak her thought aloud, how delightful a nice gray misty sky of Paris would be, and how a fresh spring shower would cool the pavements and make them glisten!
“Oh, Rosalie, how can you talk so!”
Her husband and sister were quite indignant, especially her sister, a tall young girl in the full bloom of youth and health, who, the better to see everything, was making herself as tall as possible. It was her first visit to Provence, and yet one might have thought that these shouts and gestures beneath the burning Italian sky had stirred within her some secret fibre, some dormant instinct, her southern origin, in fact, which was revealed in the heavy eyebrows meeting over her houri-like eyes, and her pale complexion, on which the fierce summer sun left not one red mark.
“Do, please, Rosalie!” pleaded Roumestan, who was determined to persuade his wife. “Get up and look at that. Did Paris ever show you anything like that?”
In the vast theatre widening into an ellipse that made a great jag in the blue sky, thousands of faces were packed together on the many rows of benches rising in terraces; bright eyes made luminous points, while bright colored and picturesque costumes spangled the whole mass with butterfly tints. Thence, as from a huge caldron, rose a chorus of joyous shouts, the ringing of voices and the blare of trumpets volatilized, as it were, by the intense light of the sun. Hardly audible on the lower stories, where dust, sand and human breath formed a floating cloud, this din grew louder as it rose and became more distinct and unveiled itself in the purer air. Above all rang out the cry of the milk-roll venders, who bore from tier to tier their baskets draped with white linen: “Li pan ou la, li pan ou la!” (Here’s your milk bread, here’s your milk bread!) The sellers of drinking-water, cleverly balancing their green glazed pitchers, made one thirsty just to hear them cry: “L’aigo es fresco! Quau voù beùre?” (The water’s fresh! Who will drink?)
Up on the highest brim of the amphitheatre, high up, groups of children playing and running noisily added a crown of sharp calls to the mass of noise below, much like a flock of martins soaring high above the other birds.