"Let me tell you, my child," she riposted, "that if you do not take my advice you will end by making Armand ridiculous. Perhaps—having known him only so short a time—you have not yet discovered that there is nothing in the world that he hates so much. I counsel you to remember this."
The victory—or at all events the last stroke in battle—undoubtedly remained with Madame de la Roche-Guyon.
(3)
"'The Tenth Muse'?" asked Horatia. "Who is she?"
The opulent but sentimental-looking lady in purple who sat next her in Madame de Chastenay's drawing-room lifted up her hands. "Is it conceivable that you have never heard of Mademoiselle Delphine Gay?" she exclaimed. "But I forgot that you were English. Mademoiselle Gay is the literary prodigy of our sex; figure to yourself a young girl already celebrated at eighteen for her verse, pensioned by His Majesty, and crowned at twenty-three in the Capitol, by the Academy of the Tiber!"
"And she is going to read us some of her poems now?"
"To recite them. She has a divine voice and manner."
Horatia looked round the room wherein, on this March evening, were seated many ladies and a few men, awaiting the intellectual treat in the midst of a light reflected with dazzling effect from the chandeliers, lustres and chimney-ornaments of cut steel, with which the apartment had lately been beautified. A little way off Armand was bending over the chair of a lady whom she did not know; he was evidently laughing. More than a week had passed since Horatia's passage of arms with the Duchesse. For two days she had refused to go and see her, then, through the agency of old Mademoiselle de la Roche-Guyon—a trembling mediator—a truce was patched up between the combatants. But if the affair appeared to have passed from the Dowager's mind it had not so quitted Horatia's. She did not say a word about it to Armand. Once or twice she was tempted to think the whole thing nonsense, the creation of a malicious brain, and certainly this evening it tended so to appear to her, for here was her husband with her at this salon, and a literary salon too. It was the first of this class that Horatia had attended, and devoutly did she hope that it might be the entry, at last, into that heaven where Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand, Alfred de Vigny, and so many constellations swam in glory.
She was recalled from her musings by a stir. Two ladies entered the room—the elder with an indescribable brio. Madame Gay had been a celebrity of the Empire, and kept about her an extraordinary aroma of those great days, a suggestion of staff-officers, mamelukes, the flash of sabres in the sun and the dust cloud over wheeling squadrons, seeming indeed as if she might at any moment break into "Partant pour la Syrie" or some hymn to Glory and Victory. Mademoiselle Delphine gained by the contrast with her parent. Tall, well-built, with a fine head beautifully set on an equally fine neck, clad in a simple white semi-classical dress wearing no ornaments, and with her abundant fair hair hanging in ringlets, she had something of the air of a sibyl. She looked about twenty-five, but was in reality a little older.
Madame Gay settled herself, and the Tenth Muse was led to a chair apart—an honourable chair, whose horse-hair seat was painted with roses and camellias. She composed herself in a suitable attitude, brought her beautiful bare arms to one side, clasped her hands loosely together, and, looking up at the ceiling, began to recite in a grave, deep, almost languorous voice, her poem on the last days of Pompeii, commemorating the fate of Théora the priestess of Apollo, and the young warrior Paulus, and recounting how, two thousand years after,