“Dishonour and disgrace are words that can never be coupled with the name of Chateau-Guerrand,” returned the lady, smiling sweetly in his face, a process that appeared to mollify him considerably. Then she completed his subjection by caressing her horse with one hand, while she reined him in so sharply with the other, that he rose on his hind-legs as if to rear straight on end.
“You are a hard mistress, madame,” said the gentleman, looking at the beautiful barb chafing and curveting to its bit.
“It is only to show I am mistress,” she answered in a low voice, that seemed to finish the business, for turning to her attendant cavalier, who had remained discreetly in the background, she signed to him that he might come up and break the tête-à-tête, while she added gaily—
“I am as fond of hunting as you are, prince. Hark! The stag is still forward. Our poor horses are dying with impatience. Let us gallop on together.”
The Marquise de Montmirail had considerably altered in character since she tended the infirmities of her poor old husband, or sat in widow’s garments with her pretty child on her knee. A few years at the Court of France had brought to the surface all the evil of her character, and seemed to have stifled in her everything that was good. She had lost the advantage of her daughter’s companionship, for Cerise (and in this perhaps the Marquise was right) had been removed to a distance from the Court and capital, to bloom into womanhood in the healthier atmosphere of a provincial convent. She missed her darling sadly, no doubt, and for the first year or two contented herself with the gaieties and distractions common to her companions. She encouraged no lover, properly so called, and had seldom fewer than three admirers at a time. Nor had the king of late taken special notice of her; so she was only hated by the other Court ladies with the due hatred to which she was entitled from her wealth, beauty, and attractions.
After a while, however, she put in for universal dominion, and then of course the outcry raised against her was loud and long sustained. She heeded it little; nay, she seemed to like it, and bandied sarcasms with her own sex as joyously, to all appearance, as she exchanged compliments with the other.
She never faltered. She never committed herself. She stood on the brink, and never turned giddy nor lost her presence of mind. What she required, it seemed, what she could not live without, was influence, more or less, but the stronger the better, over every male creature that crossed her path. When this was gained, she had done with them unless they were celebrities, or sufficiently frivolous to be as variable as herself. In either of such cases she took considerable pains to secure the empire she had won. What she liked best was to elicit an offer of marriage. She was supposed to have refused more men, and of more different ranks, than any woman in France. For bachelor or widower who came within the sphere of her influence there was no escape. Sooner or later he must blunder into the net, and the longer he fought the more complete and humiliating was his eventual defeat. “Nothing,” said the Abbé Malletort, “nothing but the certainty of the king’s unacknowledged marriage to Madame de Maintenon prevented his cousin from obtaining and refusing an offer of the crown of France.”
She was beautiful, too, no doubt, which made it so much worse—beautiful both with the beauty of the intellect and the senses. Not strictly by any rules of art, but from grace of outline, richness of colouring, and glowing radiance of health. She had all the ways, too, of acknowledged beauty; and even people who did not care for her were obliged to admit she possessed that strange, indefinite, inexplicable charm which every man finds in the woman he loves.
The poor Prince-Marshal, Hector de Chateau-Guerrand, had undergone the baptism of fire at sixteen, had fought his duels, drank his Burgundy, and lost an estate at lansquenet in a night before he was twenty. Since then he had commanded the Musketeers of the Guard—divisions of the great king’s troops—more than once a French army in the field. It was hard to be a woman’s puppet at sixty—with wrinkles and rheumatism, and failing health, with every pleasure palling, and every pain enhanced. Well, as he said himself, “le cœur ne vieillit jamais!” There is no fool like an old one. The Prince-Marshal, for that was the title by which he was best known, had never been ardently attached to anybody but himself till now. We need not envy him his condition.