His carriage was waiting for him at the porter’s lodge of his hotel. A nobleman of those days seldom walked afoot in the streets, and it took four horses at least, one coachman, one postilion, and two or three footmen in laced coats, to convey a single biped the distance of a couple of hundred metres.
As the door of his heraldry-covered coach closed on him with a bang, quoth Auguste, who had dressed him, to Etienne, who had handed the clothes and shared impartially in his master’s maledictions—
“Come, that’s not so bad, Etienne! Hein? What would you have at sixty-three? And without me, Bones of St. Martin! what is he? A monkey, a skeleton, a heap of rugs and refuse! Ah! What it is! the toilet!—when a man is really master of his work.”
The Prince-Marshal, you see, like other heroes, was none to his valet de chambre; but Auguste, a true artist, having neglected none of the minutiæ, on which success depended, looked to general results, and exulted in the masterpiece that he felt was a creation of his own genius.
Now it fell out that the Prince de Chateau-Guerrand, hereditary Grand Chasseur to the King, Master of the Horse to the Dauphin, State Exon to the sons and daughters of France, Marshal of its armies, and chevalier of half-a-dozen orders in his own and other countries, with no decoration on earth left to wish for but the Golden Fleece of Spain, which he coveted greedily in consequence, and prized above them all, arrived at the Hôtel Montmirail almost in the moment when Abbé Malletort quitted it at the front entrance, and Captain George of the Grey Musketeers left it by the garden door.
Though the Prince’s chance of victory must have been doubtful at any time, I do not think he could have chosen a more unfavourable moment to deploy into line, as it were, and offer battle in the open field. His fair enemy had already been skirmishing with one foe, and caught sight of another, whom she would willingly have engaged. Her trumpets had sounded the Alerte, her colours were displayed, her artillery was in advance, guns unlimbered, matches lighted, front cleared, all her forces ready and quivering for action—woe to the veteran when he should leave his entrenchments, and sally forth to hazard all his past successes on the rash issue of one stand-up fight!
His instincts told him he was wrong, even while he followed the obsequious lackey, in the Montmirail livery, through the glittering suite of rooms that led him to his fate. Followed, with cold hands and shaking knees, he who had led stormers and commanded armies! Even to himself there was a something of ridicule in the position; and he smiled, as a man smiles who is going to the dentist, while he whispered—“Courage, my child! It is but a quarter of an hour, after all! and yet—I wish I had put that other glass of brandy into my Lait de Poule!”
The Marquise received him more graciously than usual, and this, too, had he known it, was an omen of ill-success. But it is strange how little experience teaches in the campaigns of Cupid, how completely his guerilla style of warfare foils all regular strategy and established system of tactics. I believe any school-girl in her teens to be a match for the most insidious adversary of the opposite sex; and I think that the older the male serpent, and the oftener he has cast his skin, the more easily does his subtlety succumb to the voice of the innocent and unconscious charmer. What chance then had an honest, conceited, thick-headed old soldier, with nothing of the snake about him but his glistening outside, and labouring under the further disadvantage of being furiously in earnest, against such a proficient as the Marquise—a coquette of a dozen years’ standing, rejoicing in battle, accustomed to triumph, witty, scornful, pitiless, and to-day, for the first time, doubtful of her prowess, and dissatisfied with herself?
She had never looked better in her life; the flushed cheeks, the brilliant eyes, the simple white dress, with its scarlet breast-knots, these combined to constitute a very seductive whole, and one that, had there been a mirror in which she could see it reflected, might have gone far to strengthen the Abbé’s arguments, and to convince her that his schemes, aspiring though they seemed, were founded on a knowledge of human nature, experience, and common sense. Neither, I imagine, does a woman ever believe in her heart that any destiny can be quite beyond her reach. Though fortune may offer man something more than his share of goods and tangible possessions on this material earth, nature has conferred on woman the illimitable inheritance of the possible; and no beggar maiden is so lowly but that she may dream of King Cophetua and his crown-matrimonial laid at her shoeless feet.
To see the chance, vague, yet by no means unreasonable, of becoming Queen of France looming in the future—to entertain a preference, vague, yet by no means doubtful, for a handsome captain of Grey Musketeers—and to be made honourable love to at a little past thirty by a man and a marshal a little past sixty—was not all this enough to impart a yet deeper lustre to the glowing cheeks and the bright eyes, to bid the scarlet breast-knots heave and quiver over that warm, wilful, and impassioned heart?