“Whose boots, Tan-tan?” Nicolette would venture to ask, and a look of deep puzzlement would for a moment put to flight the laughter that dwelt in her hazel eyes.
“Thou art stupid, Nicolette,” Tan-tan would reply with a shrug of his shoulders. “Those of the Comte and Comtesse de Ventadour, of course.”
“All the day ... would he clean boots?” she insisted, in her halting little lisp. Then, as Tan-tan simply vouchsafed no reply to this foolish query, she added with a sigh of mixed emotions: “They must have worn boots and boots and boots!”
After which she dismissed the subject of her ancestor from her mind because Tan-tan had gone on talking about his: about the Comte Joseph-Alexis, and the Vicomtesse Yolande, the Marquis de Croze (a collateral), and Damoysella Ysabeau d’Agoult, she who married the Comte Jeanroy de Ventadour, and was Lady-in-waiting to Mme. de Maintenon, the uncrowned Queen of France, and about a score or more of others, all great and gallant gentlemen or beautiful, proud ladies. But above all he would never weary of talking about the lovely Rixende, who was known throughout the land as the Lady of the Laurels. They also called her Riande, for short, because she was always laughing, and was so gay, so gay, until the day when M. le Comte her husband brought her here to his old home in Provence, after which she never even smiled again. She hated the old château, and vowed that such an owl’s nest gave her the megrims: in truth she was pining for the gaieties of Paris and Versailles, and even the people here, round about, marvelled why M. le Comte chose to imprison so gay a bird in this grim and lonely cage, and though he himself oft visited the Court of Versailles after that, went to Paris and to Rambouillet, he never again took his fair young wife with him, and she soon fell into melancholia and died, just like a song-bird in captivity.
Tan-tan related all this with bated breath, and his great dark eyes were fixed with a kind of awed admiration on the picture which, in truth, portrayed a woman of surpassing beauty. Her hair was of vivid gold, and nestled in ringlets all around her sweet face, her eyes were as blue as the gentian that grew on the mountain-side; they looked out of the canvas with an expression of unbounded gaiety and joy of life, whilst her lips, which were full and red, were parted in a smile.
“When I marry,” Tan-tan would declare, and set his arms akimbo in an attitude of unswerving determination, “I shall choose a wife who will be the exact image of Rixende, she will be beautiful and merry, and she will have eyes that are as blue as the sky. Then I shall take her with me to Paris, where she will put all the ladies of the Court to the blush. But when she comes back with me to Ventadour, I shall love her so, and love her so that she will go on smiling and laughing, and never pine for the courtiers and the balls and the routs, no, not for the Emperor himself.”
Nicolette, sitting on the floor, and with her podgy arms encircling her knees, gazed wide-eyed on the beautiful Rixende who was to be the very image of Tan-tan’s future wife. She was not thinking about anything in particular, she just looked and looked, and wondered as one does when one is six and does not quite understand. Her great wondering eyes were just beginning to fill with tears, when a harsh voice broke in on Tan-tan’s eloquence.
“A perfect programme, by my faith! Bertrand, my child, you may come and kiss my hand, and then run to your mother and tell her that I will join her at coffee this afternoon.”
Bertrand did as he was commanded. The austere grandmother, tall and proud, and forbidding in a hooped gown, cut after the fashion of three decades ago, which she had never laid aside for the new-fangled modes of the mushroom Empire, held out her thin white hand, and the boy approached and kissed it, and she patted his cheek, and called him a true Ventadour.
“While we sit over coffee,” she said, vainly trying to subdue her harsh voice to tones of gentleness, “I will tell you about your little cousin. She is called Rixende, after your beautiful ancestress, and when she grows up, she will be just as lovely as this picture....”