I remained still as if she had petrified me, but the count who never wearied himself with too much thinking, exclaimed,
“Clementine is rather too romantic; she will get over it, however; she is young yet.”
We went to bid good day to the countess, whom we found suckling her baby.
“Do you know, my dear sister,” said the count, “that the chevalier here is in love with Clementine, and she seems inclined to pay him back in his own coin?”
The countess smiled and said,—
“I hope a suitable match like that may make us relations.”
There is something magical about the word “marriage.”
What the countess said pleased me extremely, and I replied with a bow of the most gracious character.
We went to pay a call on the lady who had come to the castle the day before. There was a canon regular there, who after a great many polite speeches in praise of my country, which he knew only from books, asked me of what order was the cross I carried on my breast.
I replied, with a kind of boastful modesty, that it was a peculiar mark of the favour of the Holy Father, the Pope, who had freely made me a knight of the Order of St. John Lateran, and a prothonotary-apostolic.