“Bless me! why, he is growing young again—a gentleman!—a magnifico!—What will he become next? It is quite alarming,” said Madame de la Baudraye.
“He now fulfils all your wishes at the age of twenty,” replied the lawyer.
The comparison of her future prospects with her present position was unendurable to Dinah. Only the day before, Anna de Fontaine had turned her head away in order to avoid seeing her bosom friend at the Chamarolles’ school.
“I am a countess,” said Dinah to herself. “I shall have the peer’s blue hammer-cloth on my carriage, and the leaders of the literary world in my drawing-room—and I will look at her!”—And it was this little triumph that told with all its weight at the moment of her rehabilitation, as the world’s contempt had of old weighed on her happiness.
One fine day, in May 1842, Madame de la Baudraye paid all her little household debts and left a thousand crowns on top of the packet of receipted bills. After sending her mother and the children away to the Hotel de la Baudraye, she awaited Lousteau, dressed ready to leave the house. When the deposed king of her heart came into dinner, she said:
“I have upset the pot, my dear. Madame de la Baudraye requests the pleasure of your company at the Rocher de Cancale.”
She carried off Lousteau, quite bewildered by the light and easy manners assumed by the woman who till that morning has been the slave of his least whim, for she too had been acting a farce for two months past.
“Madame de la Baudraye is figged out as if for a first night,” said he—une premiere, the slang abbreviation for a first performance.
“Do not forget the respect you owe to Madame de la Baudraye,” said Dinah gravely. “I do not mean to understand such a word as figged out.”
“Didine a rebel!” said he, putting his arm round her waist.