“Oh, the villain!” she exclaimed, loosing her hold; “what was I going to expose myself to!”
I availed myself of the opportunity, snatched my hat, and took to my heels, afraid lest the door-keeper should stop me.
I took a coach and drove to Coraline’s, where I related the adventure. She laughed heartily, and agreed with me that the prince had played me a nasty trick. She praised the presence of mind with which I had invented an impediment, but she did not give me an opportunity of proving to her that I had deceived the duchess.
Yet I was not without hope, and suspected that she did not think me sufficiently enamoured of her.
Three or four days afterwards, however, as we had supper together and alone, I told her so many things, and I asked her so clearly to make me happy or else to dismiss me, that she gave me an appointment for the next day.
“To-morrow,” she said, “the prince goes to Versailles, and he will not return until the day after; we will go together to the warren to hunt ferrets, and have no doubt we shall come back to Paris pleased with one another.”
“That is right.”
The next day at ten o’clock we took a coach, but as we were nearing the gate of the city a vis-a-vis, with servants in a foreign livery came up to us, and the person who was in it called out, “Stop! Stop!”
The person was the Chevalier de Wurtemburg, who, without deigning to cast even one glance on me, began to say sweet words to Coraline, and thrusting his head entirely out of his carriage he whispered to her. She answered him likewise in a whisper; then taking my hand, she said to me, laughingly,
“I have some important business with this prince; go to the warren alone, my dear friend, enjoy the hunt, and come to me to-morrow.”