“Madame,” said I, very energetically, “I implore you to refrain. Do not excite too severe a contest between passion and duty! I feel that I must fly you: you are already too bewitching.”
Just as I rose to depart in rushes the femme de chambre, and announces, not Monsieur the Abbe, but Monseigneur the Regent. Of course (the old resort in such cases) I was thrust in a closet; in marches his Royal Highness, and is received very cavalierly. It is quite astonishing to me what airs those women give themselves when they have princes to manage! However, my confinement was not long: the closet had another door; the femme de chambre slips round, opens it, and I congratulate myself on my escape.
When a Frenchwoman is piqued, she passes all understanding. The next day I am very quietly employed at breakfast, when my valet ushers in a masked personage, and behold my gentlewoman again! Human endurance will not go too far, and this was a case which required one to be in a passion one way or the other; so I feigned anger, and talked with exceeding dignity about the predicament I had been placed in the day before.
“Such must always be the case,” said I, “when one is weak enough to form an attachment to a lady who encourages so many others!”
“For your sake,” said the tender dame, “for your sake, then, I will discard them all!”
There was something grand in this it might have elicited a few strokes of pathos, when—never was there anything so strangely provoking—the Abbe Dubois himself was heard in my anteroom. I thought this chance, but it was more; the good Abbe, I afterwards found, had traced cause for suspicion, and had come to pay me a visit of amatory police. I opened my dressing-room door, and thrust in the lady. “There,” said I, “are the back-stairs, and at the bottom of the back-stairs is a door.”
Would not any one have thought this hint enough? By no means; this very tall lady stooped to the littleness of listening, and, instead of departing, stationed herself by the keyhole.
I never exactly learned whether Dubois suspected the visit his mistress had paid me, or whether he merely surmised, from his spies or her escritoire, that she harboured an inclination towards me; in either case his policy was natural, and like himself. He sat himself down, talked of the Regent, of pleasure, of women, and, at last, of this very tall lady in question.
“La pauvre diablesse,” said he, contemptuously, “I had once compassion on her; I have repented it ever since. You have no idea what a terrible creature she is; has such a wen in her neck, quite a goitre. Mort diable!” (and the Abbe spat in his handkerchief), “I would sooner have a liaison with the witch of Endor!”
Not content with this, he went on in his usual gross and displeasing manner to enumerate or to forge those various particulars of her personal charms which he thought most likely to steel me against her attractions. “Thank Heaven, at least,” thought I, “that she has gone!”