“Are you quite sure, madame, of the existence of the letters you say were written by Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu to this young man?” said the Duc de Grandlieu.
And he cast a look at Madame Camusot as a sailor casts a sounding line.
“I have not seen them, but there is reason to fear it,” replied Madame Camusot, quaking.
“My daughter can have written nothing we would not own to!” said the Duchess.
“Poor Duchess!” thought Diane, with a glance at the Duke that terrified him.
“What do you think, my dear little Diane?” said the Duke in a whisper, as he led her away into a recess.
“Clotilde is so crazy about Lucien, my dear friend, that she had made an assignation with him before leaving. If it had not been for little Lenoncourt, she would perhaps have gone off with him into the forest of Fontainebleau. I know that Lucien used to write letters to her which were enough to turn the brain of a saint.—We are three daughters of Eve in the coils of the serpent of letter-writing.”
The Duke and Diane came back to the Duchess and Madame Camusot, who were talking in undertones. Amelie, following the advice of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, affected piety to win the proud lady’s favor.
“We are at the mercy of a dreadful escaped convict!” said the Duke, with a peculiar shrug. “This is what comes of opening one’s house to people one is not absolutely sure of. Before admitting an acquaintance, one ought to know all about his fortune, his relations, all his previous history——”
This speech is the moral of my story—from the aristocratic point of view.