He went on. As was perhaps natural, the ancient and prized but much less sophisticated Henri Deux ware did not appeal to him. Some of the old Rouen he approved, for it was gay, and some of the Chinese porcelain, but not all.
“I can’t think what the ci-devants could see in some of this foreign stuff!” he declared, stopping before a large bowl of dark blue Chinese pottery, over which crawled sinuous dragons of lighter blue and cream faintly tinged with pink. “I call that coarse!” Valentine, who knew that her father-in-law had prized the bowl because it was early Ming, did not venture to dispute this dictum.
“I like a thing with some work in it,” went on M. Georges Camain. “Now I feel I could have done those beasts myself; look at the rough, raised outline they have. It may be old—I believe it is. Give me something more modern and delicate, like the setting of that jasper cup over there—Gouthière, I fancy. You have a good look at it afterwards, Mme Vidal.”
The jasper cup was still here then! Yes, she would have a good look at it—afterwards, not now.
From the cup, under its glass shade, M. Camain’s eyes strayed up to the portraits.
“It would be strange, would it not, if all these painted gentry round us could really see us in this sanctum of theirs,” he said suddenly, giving voice to Valentine’s own thoughts. “That old lady yonder—she looks a terror!—rather reminds me of my aunt Fourrier, who used to keep the bric-à-brac shop in the Rue St. Julien at Angers.”
And he indicated the portrait of the Duchesse Charlotte-Elisabeth, a voluminous dame who had flourished in the Regency.
“The last Duchesse of all isn’t here,” went on M. Camain, raising his spy-glass again as if, after all, he were not sure. “They destroyed her portrait the night the château was taken—again that undiscriminating zeal of the Sovereign People, more undiscriminating than usual in this case, for I understand that the Duchesse was known for her charities. And I have often regretted the destruction on other grounds, because since Mirabel has been under my charge I wanted to see what she was like, and why the Duc deserted her.”
“Deserted her!” exclaimed Valentine, in a voice that made the Deputy drop his glass and turn and look at her. Then she added faintly, “I never heard. . . . Did he desert her, then?”
“Perhaps that’s putting it rather strongly,” said Camain smiling. “We all know that the aristocrats who hopped so gaily across the frontiers in ’90 and ’91 thought they were coming back again in a few weeks. I daresay the Duc de Trélan had the same delusion. But I have heard it said that he never even gave his wife the chance of going with him—hooked it without her knowing . . . I believe they hardly ever saw one another. So she stayed behind—more fool she!—and lost her life in consequence.”