CHAPTER I.
A CHARMING IDLER.
SHOULD there be any artist who desires to depict dolce far niente in its most attractive guise, we think we might offer him as a model,—
Florence de Luceval, six months married, but not quite seventeen, a blonde with a skin of dazzling whiteness, cheeks rivalling the wild rose in hue, and a wealth of golden hair. Though tall and beautifully formed, the young lady is a trifle stout, but the slight superabundance of flesh is so admirably distributed that it only adds to her attractiveness. Enveloped in a soft mull peignoir, profusely trimmed with lace, her attitude is careless but graceful in the extreme, as, half reclining in a luxurious armchair, with her head a little to one side, and her dainty slippered feet crossed upon a big velvet cushion, she toys with a magnificent rose that is lying on her lap.
Thus luxuriously established before an open window that overlooks a beautiful garden, she gazes out through her half closed eyelids upon the charming play of light and shade produced by the golden sunbeams as they pierce the dense shrubbery that borders the walk. At the farther end of this shady path is a fountain where the water in one marble shell overflows into the larger one below; and the faint murmur of the distant fountain, the twittering of the birds, the soft humidity of the atmosphere, the clearness of the sky, and the balmy fragrance from several beds of heliotrope and huge clumps of Japanese honeysuckle seem to have plunged the fair young creature into a sort of ecstatic trance, in which body and mind are alike held captive by the same delightful lethargy.
While this incorrigible idler is thus yielding to the charm of her habitual indolence, an entirely different scene is going on in an adjoining room.
M. Alexandre de Luceval had just entered his wife's bedchamber. He was a young man about twenty-five years of age, and dark complexioned. Quick, nervous, and lithe in his movements, the natural petulance of his disposition manifested itself in his every gesture. He belonged, in fact, to that class of individuals who are blessed, or afflicted, with a desire to be always on the go, and who are utterly unable to remain for more than a minute in one place, or without busying themselves about something or other. In short, he was a man who seemed to be not only in a dozen places at once, but to be engaged in solving two problems at the same time,—that of perpetual motion and ubiquity.
It was now two o'clock in the afternoon, and M. de Luceval, who had risen with the sun,—he never slept more than four or five hours,—had already traversed half of Paris, either on foot or on horseback. When he entered his wife's bedchamber, one of her women happened to be there, and her employer, in the quick, curt way which was habitual to him, exclaimed:
"Well, has madame returned? Is she dressed? Is she ready?"
"Madame la marquise has not been out this morning, monsieur," replied Mlle. Lise, the maid.
"What! Madame did not go out at eleven o'clock, as she intended?"