The portrait sketched by the cleverest of the Vicars-General of the diocese had all the greater charm for Rosalie because there was a romance behind it. For the first time in her life she had come across the marvelous, the exceptional, which smiles on every youthful imagination, and which curiosity, so eager at Rosalie’s age, goes forth to meet half-way. What an ideal being was this Albert—gloomy, unhappy, eloquent, laborious, as compared by Mademoiselle de Watteville to that chubby fat Count, bursting with health, paying compliments, and talking of the fashions in the very face of the splendor of the old counts of Rupt. Amedee had cost her many quarrels and scoldings, and, indeed, she knew him only too well; while this Albert Savaron offered many enigmas to be solved.
“Albert Savaron de Savarus,” she repeated to herself.
Now, to see him, to catch sight of him! This was the desire of the girl to whom desire was hitherto unknown. She pondered in her heart, in her fancy, in her brain, the least phrases used by the Abbe de Grancey, for all his words had told.
“A fine forehead!” said she to herself, looking at the head of every man seated at the table; “I do not see one fine one.—Monsieur de Soulas’ is too prominent; Monsieur de Grancey’s is fine, but he is seventy, and has no hair, it is impossible to see where his forehead ends.”
“What is the matter, Rosalie; you are eating nothing?”
“I am not hungry, mamma,” said she. “A prelate’s hands——” she went on to herself. “I cannot remember our handsome Archbishop’s hands, though he confirmed me.”
Finally, in the midst of her coming and going in the labyrinth of her meditations, she remembered a lighted window she had seen from her bed, gleaming through the trees of the two adjoining gardens, when she had happened to wake in the night.... “Then that was his light!” thought she. “I might see him!—I will see him.”
“Monsieur de Grancey, is the Chapter’s lawsuit quite settled?” said Rosalie point-blank to the Vicar-General, during a moment of silence.
Madame de Watteville exchanged rapid glances with the Vicar-General.
“What can that matter to you, my dear child?” she said to Rosalie, with an affected sweetness which made her daughter cautious for the rest of her days.