“What, no medal yet, my old Cabantous, after you have saved twenty lives? Send me your papers. They adore me at the Navy Department. We must repair this injustice.”
His voice rang out warm and metallic, stamping and separating each word. One would have said that each one was a gold piece rolling out fresh from the mint. And every one went away delighted with this shining coin, leaving the platform with the beaming look of the pupil who has been awarded a prize. The most wonderful thing about this devil of a man was his prodigious suppleness in assuming the air and manner of the person to whom he was speaking, and perfectly naturally, too, apparently in the most unconscious way in the world.
With President Bédarride he was unctuous, smooth in gestures, his mouth fixed affectedly and his arm stretched forth in a magisterial fashion as if he were tossing aside his lawyer’s toga before the judge’s seat. When talking to Colonel Rochemaure he assumed a soldierly bearing, his hat slapped on one side; while with Cabantous he thrust his hands into his pockets, bowed his legs and rolled his shoulders as he walked, just like an old sea-dog. From time to time, between two embraces as it were, he turned to his Parisian guests, beaming and wiping his steaming brow.
“But, my dear Numa!” cried Hortense in a low voice with her pretty laugh, “where will you find all these tobacco shops you have been promising them?”
Roumestan bent his large head with its crop of close curling hair slightly thinned at the top and whispered: “They are promised, little sister, not given.”
And, fancying a reproach in his wife’s silence, he added:
“Do not forget that we are in Provence, where we understand each other’s language. All these good fellows understand what a promise is worth. They don’t expect to get the shops any more positively than I count on giving them. But they chatter about them—which amuses them—and their imaginations are at work: why deprive them of that pleasure? Besides, you must know that among us Southerners words have only a relative meaning. It is merely putting things in their proper focus.” The phrase seemed to please him, for he repeated several times the final words, “in their proper focus—in their proper focus—”
“I like these people,” said Hortense, who really seemed to be amusing herself immensely; but Rosalie was not to be convinced. “Still, words do signify something,” she murmured very seriously, as if communing with her own soul.
“My dear, it is a simple question of latitude.” Roumestan accompanied his paradox with a jerk of the shoulder peculiar to him, like that of a peddler putting up his pack. The great orator of the aristocracy retained several personal tricks of this kind, of which he had never been able to break himself—tricks that might have caused him in another political party to seem a representative of the common folk; but it was a proof of power and of singular originality in those aristocratic heights where he sat enthroned between the Prince of Anhalt and the Duc de la Rochetaillade. The Faubourg St. Germain went wild over this shoulder-jerk coming from the broad stalwart back that carried the hopes of the French monarchy.
If Mme. Roumestan had ever shared the illusions of the Faubourg she did so no longer, judging from her look of disenchantment and the little smile with which she listened to her husband’s words, a smile paler with melancholy than with disdain. But he left them suddenly, attracted by the sound of some peculiar music that came to them from the arena below. The crowd in great excitement was on its feet shouting “Valmajour! Valmajour!”