“I can’t guess. Nobody knows at Paris how soon one folly swallows up another. Saturn here is always devouring one or other of his children.”
“They say that Vinoy, after a most masterly retreat, is almost at our gates with 80,000 men.”
“And this day twelvemonth we may know what he does with them.”
Here Raoul, who seemed absorbed in gloomy reflections, halted before the hotel in which the Contessa di Rimini lodged, and with a nod to his brother, and a polite, if not cordial salutation to Victor, entered the porte cochere.
“Your brother seems out of spirits,—a pleasing contrast to the uproarious mirth with which Parisians welcome the advance of calamity.”
“Raoul, as you know, is deeply religious. He regards the defeat we have sustained, and the peril that threatens us, as the beginning of a divine chastisement, justly incurred by our sins—I mean, the sins of Paris. In vain my father reminds him of Voltaire’s story, in which the ship goes down with a fripon on board. In order to punish the fripon, the honest folks are drowned.”
“Is your father going to remain on board the ship, and share the fate of the other honest folks?”
“Pas si bete. He is off to Dieppe for sea-bathing. He says that Paris has grown so dirty since the 4th September, that it is only fit for the feet of the Unwashed. He wished my mother to accompany him; but she replies, ‘No; there are already too many wounded not to need plenty of nurses.’ She is assisting to inaugurate a society of ladies in aid of the Soeurs de Charite. Like Raoul, she is devout, but she has not his superstitions. Still his superstitions are the natural reaction of a singularly earnest and pure nature from the frivolity and corruption which, when kneaded well up together with a slice of sarcasm, Paris calls philosophy.”
“And what, my dear Enguerrand, do you propose to do?”
“That depends on whether we are really besieged. If so, of course I become a soldier.”