“No, monsieur, I think it is best that we go in our own coach!”
The chastiser of canaille and charmer of ladies did not seem a whit abashed. Paying them ceremonious farewell, he withdrew and repaired to his equipage, the road for which was now clear. The girls stood a minute giggling at his mannerisms, as Henriette described his finery and imitated his peacock airs.
The girls would not have smiled had they understood. La Fleur, whom they had scarcely noticed, was the pander of the Marquis’s vices. The two were deep in plot. ’Twas whispered talk, but a chance bystander might at least have overheard the words:
“... At my fete of Bel-Air––make no mistake, La Fleur––I rely on you. One hundred louis, the reward....”
Or another scene that marked de Praille’s entry into Paris, might have interested them. Driving recklessly to make up time lost in the blockade, the nobleman’s equipage knocked down and ran over a luckless denizen of the faubourgs. Carelessly flinging out gold to the relatives of the dead woman who were sobbing or cursing him, 10 he leaned forward and inquired most solicitously of the driver:
“But––are the horses hurt?”
Indeed the nobles of that time regarded the masses as little if any superior to cattle or any other of their possessions.
In the country the common man toiled a serf without wages, for his master; while in Paris itself, the centre of gayety and fashion, the fruit of his toil was expended by the aristocrats in prodigal luxury.
The bourgeoisie or middle class bore the brunt of the taxes. A gay parasitic element, the demi-monde, ministered to the nobles’ pleasures. Below, the “submerged tenth” of the thievish and begging classes plied their questionable trades, with a large margin of the city’s population on the very verge of starvation.
It hints eloquently of the terrible conditions that there were no less than thirty thousand professional beggars in Paris at this time. Their wan, pinched faces, gaunt forms and palsied vitality were an outstanding reproach to a flower-like but decadent aristocratic culture founded on the muck of cruelty and oppression.