Horatia did not like the Marquise de Beaulieu.
(2)
By the beginning of February, Horatia was beginning to feel much more at home in her new surroundings. She knew what milliners to frequent, and frequented them a good deal; she, whom the question of clothes had always rather bored, and whose well-dressed appearance in the past had been due chiefly to her father's wish and the excellence of her dressmaker, now spent hours in choosing a hat, days in deciding between the attractions of drap d'Algers and soie de chaméléon, between the becomingness, as colours, of Poland earth, wood violet, lie de vin, and souris. Rightly to accompany the fashionable hats, her hair must be more elaborately dressed than Martha's fingers could accomplish, so Martha made way in this respect for one Joséphine. Armand had admired her pose, the turn of her hand and wrist one afternoon when he had found her doing embroidery, so she gave herself assiduously to embroidery. All these avocations took up an immense amount of time. Her days seemed very full. She never opened a book, nor missed those once-constant companions; the case of them which she had brought with her was not even unpacked. If she had not Armand always to talk to, she had him to dress for, for the hours she spent before her mirror, the afternoons she fleeted in Herbault's shop, were far, very far, from being ends in themselves.
Horatia's was indeed the exaggerated fervour of the convert. She looked back now on that blind and self-complacent person who, in the Rectory garden, only a few months ago, had wondered about her married friends "how can they!" Armand had come, and in a moment of time she had realised "how they could." Like all converts she had turned against her old life, and found nothing good in it at all. She would gladly have burned that which she once adored. For this glorious thing was love, and in her ignorance she had jeered at it; could a life-long repentance and years vowed to the joys she had once derided ever atone for her neglect? Her books, the tastes that she had shared with her father and Tristram, all these things were hollow and useless, for love had called to her, and she had answered. Henceforward she would go singing through the world with Armand, always with Armand. Together they had found and would keep the divine secret.
Together, at least, they saw Paris. He showed her sometimes the Paris of history in general, sometimes the Paris of his own history. For, wonderful and almost terrible as it was to stand on the site of the guillotine in the great Place, to shudder in the narrow cell of the Conciergerie that had held Marie Antoinette, to walk down the street where Henri IV had met his death, it was even more wonderful to think that for twenty-six years this other self of hers had inhabited the fortunate city—and that she had not known it. So her husband, laughing at her, had to show her the haunts of his boyhood, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he had been an externe, the little private pension in the Rue d'Enfer where he had boarded, even the academy at which he had learnt to fence and to ride. Pursuing her researches into this delightful region of the past, she discovered that Armand had previously had a private tutor, who, in order more easily to lead an unruly pupil in the paths of learning, had invented a method of combining amusement and instruction on their walks abroad. Hence the Champs Elysées were sacred to her because here the youthful Armand, taken to watch other children playing at ball, learnt the laws of gravity, and she could not see the old soldiers stooping at bowls under the trees of the Invalides without remembering that this sight had served to illustrate, to his childish mind, the double law governing the movements of a spherical body propelled along the ground.
When they drove or walked together, passers-by sometimes turned smiling to bestow a glance on so much youth and happiness. Horatia was sure that Armand's good looks were the magnet; he affirmed that it was hers, or the fact that she was English. This she would deny, asserting that she was now indistinguishable from a Frenchwoman. But one day, in a perfumer's, before she could even open her mouth, the owner of the shop had pushed forward divers bottles of English manufacture, had offered her "Vindsor soap" and Hunt's blacking, and had shaken out before her a silk handkerchief with a portrait of O'Connell in the middle of it. Armand, delighted at her confusion, immediately led her to a neighbouring pastry-cook's, displaying the legend "Here is to be had all sorts of English pastry," and speaking, by notices in its windows, of such insular delicacies as "hot mutton pies," "oyster patties," "Devonshire cider," and "Whitbread's entire." "We are suffering from Anglomania at present," he explained, "and everything English is deemed 'romantic,' so you need not, my angel, pretend to be French."
The magic word brought to Horatia's memory a young man whom she had seen a few days ago walking gloomily in the garden of the Luxembourg, a young man evidently aspiring to the aspect of "l'homme fatal," with open shirt collar, tumbled black hair, wild, melancholy eyes, and smile of conscious bitterness, in whom she recognised a product of the new French Byronism. Although she hoped in time to meet some of the adherents of this school, she was secretly glad that Armand was not of its type.
Thus they visited the Jardin des Plantes and the Boulevards, Notre Dame, the still unfinished Arc de Triomphe, the pictures in the Louvre, and (not altogether willingly on Armand's part) M. Sommerard's collection of mediæval antiquities in the Rue Mesnars.
(3)
Horatia was destined also to see Paris under a less smiling aspect.