CHAPTER VI. NEIGHBOURS.
“Chaque homme a trois caractères: celui qu'il a, celui qu'il
montre, et celui qu'il croit avoir.”
By one of the strokes of good fortune which come but once to the most ardent student of fashion, the Baroness de Mélide had taken up horsiness at the very beginning of that estimable craze. It was, therefore, in mere sequence to this pursuit that she fixed her abode on the south side of the Champs Elysées, and within a stone's throw of the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, before the world found out that it was quite impossible to live elsewhere. It is so difficult, in truth, to foretell the course of fashion, that one cannot help wondering why the modern soothsayers, who eke out what appears to be a miserable existence in the smaller streets of the Faubourg St. Honoré and in the neighbourhood of Bond Street, do not turn their second-sight to the contemplation of the future of streets and districts, instead of telling the curious a number of vague facts respecting their past and vaguer prophecies as to the future.
If, for instance, Cagliostro had foretold that to-day the Chausée d'Antin would be deserted; that the faubourg would have completely ousted the Rue St. Honoré; that the Avenue de la Grande Armée should be, fashionably speaking, dead after a short and brilliant life; and that the little streets of the Faubourg St. Germain should be all that is most chic—what fortunes might have been made! Indeed, no one in a trance or in his right mind can tell to-day why it is right to walk on the right-hand side of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Boulevard des Capucines, and heinously wrong to walk on the left; while, on the contrary, no self-respecting Parisian would allow himself to be seen on the right-hand pavement of the Boulevard de la Madeleine. Indeed, these things are a mystery, and the wise seek only to obey, and not to ask the reason why.
It would be difficult to lay before the English reader the precise social position of the Baroness de Mélide. For there are wheels within wheels, or, more properly perhaps, shades within shades, in the social world of Paris, which are quite unsuspected on this side of the Channel. Indeed, our ignorance of social France is only surpassed by the French ignorance of social England. The Baroness de Mélide was rich, however, and the rich, as we all know, have nothing to fear in this world. As a matter of fact, Monsieur de Mélide dated his nobility from Napoleon's creation, and madame's grandfather was of the Emigration. By conviction, they belonged to the Anglophile school, and theirs was one of the prettiest little houses between the Avenue Victor Hugo and the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, which is more important than ancestors.
It was to this miniature palace that Mademoiselle Brun and Denise were bidden, to the new function of afternoon tea, the day after the receipt of the lawyer's letter. Madame de Mélide would take no denial.
“I have already heard of Denise's good fortune; and from whom do you think?” she wrote. “From my dear good cousin, Lory de Vasselot, who is, if you will believe it, a Corsican neighbour—the Vasselot and Perucca estates actually adjoin. Both, I need hardly tell you, bristle with bandits, and are quite impossible. But I have quite decided that Lory shall marry Denise. Come, therefore, without fail. I need not tell you to see that Denise looks pretty. The good God has seen to that for you. And as for Lory, he is an angel. I cannot think why I did not marry him myself—except that he did not ask me. And then there is my stupid, whom nobody else would have, and who now sends his dear love to his oldest friend.—Your devoted JANE.”
The Baroness de Mélide was called Jeanne, but she had enthusiastically changed that name for its English version at the period when England was, as it were, first discovered by social France.
When Mademoiselle Brun and Denise arrived, they found the baroness beautifully dressed as usual, and very French, for the empress was at this time the leader of the world's women, as the emperor—that clever parvenu—was undoubtedly the first monarch in Europe. It behoves not a masculine pen to attempt a description of Madame de Mélide's costume, which, moreover, was of a bygone mode, and nothing is so unsightly in death as a deceased fashion.