When worldly mammas, essentially of the second empire, who perhaps had doubts respecting a purely conventional education, made inquiries on this subject, the mother-superior, feeling very wicked and worldly, usually made mention of the mathematical mistress, Denise Lange, daughter of the great and good general who was killed at Solferino. And no other word of identification was needed. For some keen-witted artist had painted a great salon picture of, not a young paladin, but a fat old soldier, eighteen stone, on his huge charger, with shaking red cheeks and blazing eyes, standing in his stirrups, bursting out of his tight tunic, and roaring to his enfants to follow him to their death.
It was after the battle of Solferino that Mademoiselle Brun had come into Denise Lange's life, taking her from her convent school to live in a dull little apartment in the Rue des Saints Pères, educating her, dressing her, caring for her with a grim affection which never wasted itself in words. How she pinched and saved, and taught herself that she might teach others; how she triumphantly made both ends meet,—are secrets which, like Mademoiselle Brun's romance, she would not tell. For French women are not only cleverer and more capable than French men, but they are cleverer and more capable than any other women in the world. History, moreover, will prove this; for nearly all the great women that the world has seen have been produced by France.
Denise and Mademoiselle Brun still lived in the dull little apartment in the Rue des Saints Pères—that narrow street which runs southward from the Quai Voltaire to the Boulevard St. Germain, where the cheap frame-makers, the artists' colourmen, and the dealers in old prints have their shops. To the convent school, the old woman and the young girl, walking daily through the streets to their work, brought with them that breath of worldliness which the advance of civilization seemed to render desirable to the curriculum of a girls' school.
“It must be heavenly, mademoiselle, to walk in the streets quite alone,” said one of Mademoiselle Brun's pupils to her one day.
“It is,” was the reply; “especially near the gutter.”
But this afternoon there was no conversation, for the literature class knew that Mademoiselle Brun was in a contrary humour.
“She is looking at that dear Denise with discontented eyes. She is in a shocking temper,” had been the whispered warning from mouth to mouth.
And in truth Mademoiselle Brun constantly glanced down the length of the schoolroom to where Denise was sitting. But a seeing eye could well perceive that it was not with Denise, but with the schoolroom, that the little old woman was discontented. Perhaps she had at times a cruel thought that the Rue des Saints Pères, emphasized as it were by the Rue du Cherche-Midi, was hardly gay for a young life. Perhaps the soft touch of spring that was in the March air stirred up restless longings in the soul of this little grey town-mouse.
And while she was watching Denise, the cross-grained old nun who acted as concierge to this quiet house came into the room, and handed Denise a long blue envelope.
“It is addressed in a man's handwriting,” she said warningly.