"Armand," said poor Horatia, "this is certainly worse than the guillotine. Supposing Madame la Duchesse does not approve of me to-night; supposing that all your relations think me foreign or dowdy. I am sure their dresses will be quite different from mine."
"Their coiffures may be," agreed the young man. "Some of them will wear their hair à la Chinoise and look like Hurons; you must try not to laugh. (And let me warn you, chère amie, that if I see you disfiguring your beautiful hair by adopting that style, I shall desert you on the instant.) Have you remembered all my other warnings? Do not forget that though my aunt des Sablières is very deaf she cannot bear to be shouted at; that if Charles X is mentioned, Madame de Camain will probably burst into tears. Somewhere in the dim past the Comte d'Artois was—well, flirted with her. Do not talk of English admirals, ships, or sailors to the old Comte de Fezensac; he lost an eye at the siege of Gibraltar in 1779. Above all remember to speak of the Duc de Bordeaux as Henri V; you would do well to refer occasionally to the Duchesse de Berry as the Regent, for my father writes that she will shortly be made so. As you cannot disclose anything derogatory to Louis-Philippe you had better not mention him at all. You must be friendly with my cousin Eulalie de Beaulieu, for she will serve as your chaperon on occasions. I think that is all." He pulled up his high cravat, glanced at himself a moment critically in the long glass, and said to Horatia, "My darling, a little fright becomes you amazingly.... Let us go to the scaffold!"
CHAPTER III
(1)
If Kerfontaine had been to Horatia a kind of fairy castle, the Faubourg St. Germain resembled a land half savage, half enchanted, something between the domains of Haroun al Raschid and the country round the Niger, a place full of the oddest customs, and demanding considerable intrepidity in the explorer. The tribal gathering on New Year's Day had been alarming, but its members were kinder to her than she had expected. Afterwards, her chief impressions were: of faded dowagers, condescending or cold; of Madame la Marquise de Beaulieu, a cousin of Armand's and her destined chaperon, a high blonde of thirty-five or so, coiffée à la Minerve, wearing a sky-blue velvet dress encircled at the knees with a row of pink feathers; of a little creeping old lady, as grey as dust, Mlle Claire de la Roche-Guyon, some remote kinswoman of the Duke's, who lived in the Hôtel; of men, old or middle-aged, and extremely courtly and gallant; of two or three youths, and a small boy of eleven, Claude-Edmond, the "ill-fated" heir, quiet and extraordinarily self-possessed, who, oddly enough, did not live in the house, but boarded with a tutor near the Lycée Louis-le-Grand—and of a tall, grey-haired priest with a young face, Monsignor Prosper de la Roche-Guyon, a striking figure in his cassock touched with purple, though ecclesiastical garb had been unsafe to wear in the streets since the Days of July. Dominating all was the Duchesse in her chair, crowned with a toupée in lustre like sealskin, in hue like the pelt of a fox, accepting graciously the offerings of her descendants—from one, the latest clock, Queen Blanche in gold reclining on a seat, whereon were marked the hours; from another, such an inkpot as Armand had described, in the form of a crocodile; from an undiscriminating but inspired great-nephew, one of the newest parasols with eye-glasses in the handle. And, though the Dowager scarcely ever went out, she was pleased with this gift; while a highly suitable foot-basket, lined with violet velvet and trimmed with chinchilla, drew from her the snorting exclamation, that the donor evidently regarded her as decrepit. It was a thoroughly matriarchal scene ...
Ere a couple of weeks had passed, Horatia had both learnt and done many things. She had had, first of all, her visites de noces to pay; the earliest of these had been to the oldest inhabitants of the Faubourg St. Germain, the aged dowagers who never stirred from their armchairs, but whose word was still a power. To them, as to some elders of a tribe, a bride must always be taken for ten minutes' inspection; by them were the frankest of opinions expressed on her looks and gait, on eyes and teeth. Three of these ancients, in succession, having pronounced of Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon that "elle était très bien," Horatia was thenceforward established upon a proper footing.
She soon learnt, also, how many more visits she would have had to pay but for recent political events. (Those events, too, had disposed of the question of her presentation at Court, which would otherwise have taken precedence of all else.) Half the ladies of the Faubourg—or at least of the ultra section of the Faubourg—had shut up their hôtels, countermanded all their orders at the shops, and reclaiming from their maids, so it was said, their last year's dresses and hats, had gone to endure the martyrdom of a winter in their châteaux in the country, hoping thereby to ruin an ungrateful and disloyal Paris. Of those remaining Horatia found that she might only know the elect, the ultras, the "Carlistes," the "Dames de la Résistance," those who, in the expressive phrase of the day, were "sulking"—those who had not and never would bow the knee to Baal in the person of Louis-Philippe and the Orleanist monarchy. One or two former friends of the Duchesse's were reported to be among the "Dames de l'Attente," those who waited to see how the wind blew; they had already been scratched off that lady's visiting list. And one—O horror!—had gone over to the "Dames du Mouvement," and had been received in the house of Rimmon at the Palais-Royal (for Louis-Philippe had not yet migrated to the Tuileries). Of all objects in any way connected with her—her old visiting-cards, a forgotten pair of gloves, and what not—there had been, so Armand assured his wife, a solemn auto-da-fé in the Dowager's bedroom.
But some of the receptions which she was allowed to attend were to Horatia rather trying. Not Semiramis nor Catherine of Russia could have presented a more imposing front, nor have swayed a more despotic sceptre, than Madame la Princesse de Ligniville, with her little red-bordered eyes, her false front of fair hair, her dropsical corpulence, who, seated almost immoveably in her green damask armchair in her famous library of lemon wood, and surrounded by a throng of politicians, received her one evening. Madame de Ligniville could never have had any pretensions to beauty, yet for years she had exercised an absolute dominion. She was very well read, by no means religious, lively and sarcastic, and devoured with a passion for politics. Horatia, as well as being somewhat terrified of the great lady herself, felt lost among these political lights, whose names she did not even know. The lemon-wood library was not a salon—it was a throne-room.
There was, indeed, one salon which surprised Horatia by its unlikeness to the rest, that of the Duchesse de Montboissier. Here seven ladies of varying ages, from eighty to eighteen, sat round a table lit by a hanging lamp and did fancy work while they chattered to their guests—and these were some of the bluest blood in France. The conversation was lively, natural, and totally devoid of any intellectual interest, circling round tales of the day and fashions, and interspersed with scandal. The old Comtesse de Montboissier-Saligny, who presided, contributed indeed anecdotes of a kind highly unsuited to the ears of her youngest granddaughter. Horatia commented on this afterwards to the Marquise de Beaulieu, her companion on this occasion.
"Que voulez-vous?" asked that lady. "It was not the fashion to be prudish at the time of the emigration, and the Comtesse, by all accounts, was by no means averse to the society of the gallant abbés and worldly prelates of the days before '93. But you must not think, ma chère," she added, "when you hear these old dames telling racy stories, that their own morals are questionable. The more free their tongues, the more irreproachable, probably, their past conduct. One must have some compensation. Our own respected grandmother, for instance, makes even my hair stand on end sometimes. But I am sure she has always been discretion itself."