“With all other women,” said Malletort, “you have indeed a thousand rivals to out-do; still you know their numbers and can calculate their resources; but with the Frenchwoman, in addition to these, you have yet another, who changes and multiplies himself day by day—who assumes a thousand Protean forms, and against whom you cannot employ the most efficient weapons—such as vanity, gaiety, and love of dissipation, by which the others are to be subdued. This enemy is dress—King Chiffon is the absolute monarch of these realms. Your mistress is gay when you are sad, sarcastic when you are plaintive, reserved when you are adventurous. All this is a matter of course; but as Monsieur Vauban told the king the other day in these gardens, ‘no fortress is stronger than its weakest place,’ and every citadel may be carried by a coup de main, or reduced by the slower process of blockade. But here you have a stronghold within a stronghold; a reserve that can neither be tampered with in secret nor attacked openly; in brief a rival who owns this incalculable advantage, that in all situations and under all circumstances he occupies the first place in your mistress’s thoughts. Bah!” concluded the Abbé, throwing from him the branch which he had stripped of leaves and blossoms, with a gesture that seemed thus to dismiss the subject once for all; “put a Frenchwoman into what position you will, her sympathies indeed may be with her lover, but her first consideration is for her dress!”
As the Abbé spoke he observed a group of four persons passing the front of the palace, under the windows of the king’s dining-saloon. It consisted of little Cerise, her mother, Célandine, and the page. They were laughing and chatting gaily, George apparently taking his leave of the other three. Florian observed a shadow cross the Abbé’s face, that disappeared, however, from those obedient features quickly as it came; and at the same moment the Marquise passed her hand caressingly over the boy’s dark curls, while he bent low before her, and seemed to do homage to her beauty in the act of bidding her a courteous farewell.
CHAPTER IV
TANTARA!
Year by year a certain stag had been growing fatter and fatter in the deep glades and quiet woodlands that surrounded Fontainebleau. He was but a pricket when Cerise made her daisy-chain in the gardens of Versailles, but each succeeding summer he had rubbed the velvet off another point on his antlers, and in all the king’s chase was no finer head than he carried the day he was to die. Brow, bay, and tray, twelve in all, with three in a cup at the summits, had been the result of some half-score years passed in the security and shelter of a royal forest; nor was the lapse of time which had thus brought head and haunch to perfection without its effect upon those for whose pastime the noble beast must fall.
Imagine, then, a glowing afternoon, the second week in August. Not a cloud in the sky, a sun almost tropical in its power, but a pure clear air that fanned the brow wherever the forest opened into glades, and filled the broad nostrils of a dozen large, deep-chested, rich-coloured stag-hounds, snuffing and questing busily down a track of arid grass that seemed to have checked their steady, well-considered unrelenting chase, and brought their wondrous instinct to a fault. One rider alone watched their efforts with a preoccupied air, yet with the ready glance of an old sportsman. He had apparently reached his point of observation before the hounds themselves, and far in advance of the rest of the chase. His close-fitting blue riding-coat, trimmed with gold-lace and turned back with scarlet facings, called a “just au corps,” denoted that he was a courtier; but the keen eye, the erect figure, the stateliness, even stiffness of his bearing, smacked of the old soldier, more, the old soldier of France, perhaps the most professional veteran in the world.
He was not so engrossed with his own thoughts, however, but that his eye gleamed with pleasure when a tan-coloured sage, intent on business, threw a square sagacious head into the air, proclaiming in full deep notes his discovery of the line, and solemn conviction that he was right. The horseman swore a good round garrison oath, and cheered the hound lustily. A cry of tuneful tongues pealed out to swell the harmony. A burst of music from a distant glade announced that the stag had passed yet farther on. A couple of royal foresters, in blue and red, arrived on foot, breathless, with fresh hounds struggling in the leash; and a lady on a Spanish barb, attended by a plainly-dressed ecclesiastic, came cantering down the glade to rein up at the veteran’s side, with a smile of greeting on her face.
“Well met, Monsieur le Prince, once more,” said she, flashing a look from her dark eyes, under which, old as he was, he lowered his own. “Always the same—always successful. In the Court—in the camp—in the ball-room—in the field—if you seek the Prince-Marshal, look in the most forward post, and you will find him.”
She owed him some reparation for having driven him from her side in a fit of ill-humour half an hour before, and this was her way of making amends.
“I have won posts in my time, madame,” said the old soldier, an expression of displeasure settling once more on his high worn features, “and held them, too, without dishonour. It is perhaps no disgrace to be worsted by a woman, but it is humiliating and unpleasant all the same.”