She had never admitted so much.
“Come, courage, then!” he exclaimed; “it appears now as if it would be tolerably safe; and with you and Nathalie—if I can win her—by my side, one may defy even—”
“Who!” demanded his mother, anxiously.
“Oh, Monsieur Bourget, to be sure!” he cried, with a laugh, as he shut the door.
It was true, although Mme. de Beaudrillart would not believe it, and although M. de Bourget growled at the girl’s whims, that Nathalie hesitated whether or not she should accept M. de Beaudrillart. For her neither Poissy nor alliance with an ancient family offered attractions; on the contrary, she thought of both with dread and shrinking, foreseeing trials which might prove almost unendurable. If the course of wooing had been such as Mme. de Beaudrillart’s etiquette exacted, and all the advances had been made by deputy, it is very certain that Nathalie would have rejected her honours, in spite of her terrible father’s displeasure. But a nameless something had attracted her to Léon on the day when they first met before the cathedral, and each of the two interviews which followed deepened the attraction. There was an open, easy charm about the young man difficult to resist. She knew that he had been extravagant, and the knowledge caused her some disquiet, but would not have shaken her determination; indeed, disgraceful as it would have seemed to Mme. de Beaudrillart, when they had seen each other but three times, she was hopelessly and irretrievably in love.
Then, one day, in an old carriage, as old as the hills, drawn by two borrowed horses, and driven by Jean Charpentier’s brother, Mme. de Beaudrillart rolled into Tours, and solemnly demanded the hand of Mlle. Nathalie Bourget for her son, M. Léon de Beaudrillart.
To her son, even, his mother never related the details of that interview. M. Bourget, not so reticent, repeated over and over again with glee the speeches he had made, the answers he had received. While he took care to preserve to himself the honours of the encounter, he delighted in accentuating Mme. de Beaudrillart’s pride, that those who listened to him might not fail to understand what sort of family this was into which Nathalie was about to marry. It was true that some of her fine sarcasms, her scarcely-veiled contempt, were as little felt by him as the sting of a gnat upon the hide of a rhinoceros; but he was acute enough to understand that she wished to humiliate him as a revenge for the humiliation she was enduring herself, and appreciated the desire as fitting on the part of the owners of Poissy. She had said to him:
“I cannot attempt to conceal from you, Monsieur Bourget, that my son’s choice has caused me profound astonishment. With his person and his position, he might have married into any of the great families of France, and I am certain you are too sensible a man to take offence when I say that such a marriage would have appeared to me far more appropriate.”
“Perhaps Monsieur de Beaudrillart reflects that when one marries one must live,” remarked M. Bourget, dryly.
But so far was he from taking offence that he repeated the speech with real enjoyment to a small lawyer of his acquaintance, a red republican like himself.