But in a few days there came a letter from him begging her, not without a certain stiffness, to forgive him for what, in the heat of the moment, had passed his lips, and offering her, if she had reconsidered her decision, his escort to Coblentz, or, if she preferred it, to England. Otherwise, for the short absence which he proposed to make, she would find that his affairs were sufficiently in order not to incommode her, and he prayed her to remain at Mirabel or wherever seemed good to her.
Except for an absence of feeling the letter was perfect, but Mme de Trélan knew that it was the letter of a man who wishes to set himself right in his own eyes for what he considers a lapse from good taste. She thought emigration foolish and unpatriotic—the day had not yet come when it was the only chance of safety for the wellborn—and she could not bring herself to accept an amende prompted less by affection for her than by a desire for rehabilitation. And if it was to be a short absence, why leave France at all? Down at her country house in Touraine she was, besides, interesting herself in a certain philanthropic scheme of her own. So she answered the Duc’s letter in much the same spirit, asked his pardon also for her hasty words—and refused.
The Duc de Trélan never came back. From Coblentz he went to England, and though he and his wife at first kept up a desultory correspondence on matters of business, for five or six months before the sack of Mirabel she had not had a line from him. Intercourse with England was by that time becoming uncertain, but she had news of him through less direct channels. By all accounts Gaston de Trélan was much too popular in English society to find time for writing to the wife who so deeply disapproved of his having taken refuge there.
CHAPTER IV
JADIS
(1)
But the strange twist of Fortune’s wheel which, nine years after her husband’s departure, had brought the Duchesse de Trélan as concierge to her own palace, was first set in motion when M. Georges Camain, originally a builder at Angers, was returned at the elections of 1795 as Deputy for Maine-et-Loire, and, coming up to Paris to take his seat, received, after a time, from the Director Larevellière-Lépeaux—like him an Angevin and the quasi-pontiff of that new and arid creed which M. Camain also professed, Theophilanthropism—the charge of Mirabel. For M. Camain was a cousin of Suzon Tessier’s, though they had not met since Suzon was a child.
Nor indeed did the Deputy discover Suzon’s existence till the year that Alcibiade Tessier died; but after that he was pretty assiduous in his visits. Valentine sometimes wondered if he had a vision of consoling the little widow. She herself met him occasionally at meals—a person of forty-five or so, large, high-coloured, good-humoured, inclined to a florid style in dress and a slightly vulgar gallantry. Report said that down at Angers in ’94 he had been a Terrorist, but Suzon discreetly refrained from making enquiries on that point. Now he seemed so moderate in his politics that it was hard to understand how he had escaped being fructidorisé with the other moderate and Royalist deputies in the coup d’état of 1797.
M. Camain found, of course, that Suzon’s “aunt” had already lived with her for years, and he was not sufficiently conversant with his cousin’s relations by marriage to contest any statements which Mme Tessier chose to make about her kinswoman’s past history. Even her neighbours in the Rue de Seine scarcely remembered now, so fast did events move, that Mme Vidal had begun her residence with the Tessiers at a very significant date in 1792, and had passed more than a year in prison since. Besides, M. Camain did not frequent any house in the street but Suzon’s.
One afternoon, therefore, in March, 1799, the Deputy, dropping in, in his genial way, to his cousin’s little shop, said, after some casual conversation, “By the way, ma cousine, how would you like to live in a château?” and when Mme Tessier, who was sewing behind the counter, replied that she had no such ambition, her kinsman admitted that she might find Mirabel lacking in cosiness.