‘It is there I would wish to dw-e-e-ll.’”
Her two agile hands fell back upon the piano, scattering the end of her dream in a tumult of resounding notes.
“And not one word about the tabor-player!” thought Rosalie. “That’s a serious thing!”
It was a good deal more serious than she imagined.
From the day when Audiberte had seen Mlle. Le Quesnoy fasten a flower on the tabor of her brother, from that very moment there arose in her ambitious soul a splendid vision of the future, which had not been without its effect on their transplantation to Paris. The reception which Hortense gave her, when she came to complain about her brother’s obstination in running after Numa, defined and strengthened her in her still vague hope. And since then, gradually, without opening her mind to her men-folks otherwise than through half words, she prepared the path with the duplicity of the peasant woman who is nearly an Italian, gliding and crawling forward. From her seat in the kitchen in the Place Royale, where she began by waiting timidly in a corner on the edge of a chair, she crept into the drawing-room and installed herself, always neat and trig, in the position of a poor relation.
Hortense was crazy about her, showed her to her friends as if she were a pretty piece of bric-à-brac brought from that land of Provence which she always spoke of with enthusiasm. And the other girl played herself off as more simple than nature allows, exaggerated her savage rages, her tirades of wrath with clenched fist against the muddy sky of Paris, and would often use a charming little exclamation, Boudiou, the effect of which she arranged and watched like a kittenish girl on the stage. The President himself had smiled at this Boudiou, and just to think of having made the President smile!
But it was in the young girl’s bedroom, when they were alone, that she put all her tricks in play. All of a sudden she would kneel at her feet, would seize her hand, go into ecstasies over the smallest points of her toilet, her way of making a bow in a ribbon, her manner of dressing her hair, letting slip those heavy compliments directly in her face, which give great pleasure all the same, so spontaneous and naïve do they appear.
Oh, when the young lady stepped out of the carriage in front of the mas [the farm-house], she thought she saw the queen of the angels in person! and she was for a time speechless at the sight, and her brother, pécaïré, when he heard on the stones of the descending road the noise of the carriage which took back the little Parisian, he said it was as if those stones, one by one, were falling on his heart. She played a great rôle with regard to this brother, his pride and his anxieties—his anxieties, now why? I just ask you why—since that reception at the “Menistry” he was being talked about in all the papers and his portrait was seen everywhere and such invitations as he got in the Faubourg Saint-Germoine—why he couldn’t meet them all! Duchesses, countesses, wrote him notes on splendid paper—they had coronets on their letters just like those on the carriages which they sent to bring him in; and still—well, no, he wasn’t happy, the “pore” man! All these things whispered in Hortense’s ear gave her some share of the fever and magnetic will-power of the peasant girl. Then, without looking at Audiberte, she asked if perhaps Valmajour did not have down there in Provence a betrothed who was waiting for him.
“He a betrothed?—avaï! you do not know him—he has much too much belief in himself to desire a peasant girl. The richest girls have been on his track, the Des Combette girl, and then still another, and a lot of gay ladies—you know what I mean! He did not even look at them. Who knows what it is he is revolving in his head? Oh, these artists—”
And that word, a new one for her, assumed on her ignorant lips an expression hard to define, somewhat like the Latin spoken at mass, or some cabalistic formula picked up in a book of magic. The heritage which would come from Cousin Puyfourcat returned again and again during the course of this adroit gossip.