He quite despised himself for his folly, and, driving off his troubles with the customary jerk of his shoulder, went upstairs to dismiss the Council, for he had no time left to preside to-day.
“What has happened to you, my dear Excellency, you seem to have renewed your youth?”
This question was asked him a dozen times in the lobby of the Chambers, where his good humor was remarked upon and where he caught himself humming, “O Magali, my well-beloved.” Sitting on the Bench he listened with an attention most flattering to the speaker during a long-winded discourse about the tariff, smiling beatifically beneath his lowered eyelids.
So the Left, whom his character for astuteness held in awe, said timidly one to the other: “Let us hold fast, Roumestan is preparing a coup!” In reality he was engaged in bringing before his mental vision, through the empty hum of the wearying discourse, the outlines of little Bachellery, trotting her out, as it were, before the Ministerial Bench, passing her attractions in review, her hair waving like a golden net across her brow, her wild-rose complexion, her bewitching air of a girl who was already a woman!
Nevertheless, that evening he had another attack of moodiness on the train returning from Versailles with some of his colleagues of the Cabinet. In the heated carriage where every one was smoking they were discussing, in the free and easy manner that Numa always carried about with him, a certain orange-colored velvet bonnet in the diplomats’ gallery that framed a pale Creole face; it had proved an agreeable diversion from the tariff question and caused all the honorable noses to rise, just as the sudden appearance of a butterfly in a school-room will fix the attention of the class in the middle of a Greek lesson. Who was she? No one knew.
“You must ask the General,” said Numa gayly, turning to the Marquis d’Espaillon d’Aubord, Minister of War, an old rake, tireless in love. “That’s all right—do not try to get out of it—she never looked at any one but you.”
The General cut a sinister grimace that caused his old yellow goat’s moustache to fly up under his nose as if it were moved by springs.
“It is a good while since women have bothered themselves about me—they only care for bucks like that!”
In this extremely choice language peculiar to noblemen and soldiers he indicated young De Lappara, sitting modestly in a corner of the carriage with Numa’s portfolio on his lap, respectfully silent in the company of the big-wigs.