‘I dare swear she will limn me as a beautiful princess, with Robert Pilou as my knight, or else I’ll be—what d’ye call her—that heathen goddess, and Robert Pilou will be my owl!’
Madeleine had been strangely embarrassed for the last few minutes. When she was nervous the sound of her father’s voice tortured her, and feeling the imminence of a favourite story of his about an old lady of Lyons, called Madame Hibou, who had found her gardener drunk in her bed, she felt she would go mad if she had to listen to it again, so to stop him, she said hurriedly, ‘Could you tell us, Madame, whom some of the characters in the Grand Cyrus are meant to depict?’
‘Oh! every one is there, every one of the Court and the Town. I should be loath to have you think I wasted my time in reading all the dozen volumes, but I cast my eye through some of them, and I don’t hold with dressing up living men and women in all these outlandish clothes and giving them Grecian names. It’s like the quacks on the Pont-Neuf, who call themselves “Il Signor Hieronymo Ferranti d’Orvieto,” and such like, though they are only decent French burghers like the rest of us!’
‘Or might it not be more in the nature of duchesses masquerading at the Carnival as Turkish ladies and shepherdesses?’ suggested Madeleine in a very nervous voice, her face quite white, as though she were a young Quakeress, bearing testimony for the first time.
‘Oh, well, I dare swear that conceit would better please the demoiselle,’ said Madame Pilou good-humouredly. ‘But it isn’t only in romances that we aren’t called by our good calendar names—oh, no, you are baptized Louise, or Marie, or Marguerite, but if you want to be in the mode, you must call yourself Amaryllis, or Daphne, or Phillis,’ and Madame Pilou minced out the names, her huge mouth pursed up. ‘I tell them that it is only actors and soldiers—the scum of the earth—who take fancy names. No, no, I am quite out of patience with the present fashion of beribboning and beflowering the good wood of life, as if it were a great maypole.’
‘And I am clearly on the other side!’ cried Madame Troqueville hotly, ‘I would have every inch of the hard wood bedecked with flowers!’
‘Well, well, Marie, life has dealt hardly with you,’ said Madame Pilou, throwing a menacing look at Monsieur Troqueville, ‘but life and I have ever been good friends; and the cause may be that we are not unlike one to the other, both strong and tough, and with little tomfoolery about us.’ Madame Troqueville gazed straight in front of her, her eyes for the moment as chill as Madeleine’s. This was more than she could stand, she, the daughter of an eminent judge, to be pitied by this coarse old widow of an attorney.
‘Maybe the reason you have found life not unkind is because you are not like the dog in the fable,’ said Madeleine shyly, ‘who lost the substance out of greediness to possess the shadow.’
Madame Pilou was delighted. Any reference to Æsop’s fables was sure to please her, for it brought her the rare satisfaction of recognising a literary allusion.
‘That is very prettily said, my child,’ and she chuckled with glee. Then she looked at Madeleine meditatively. ‘But see here, as you are so enamoured of the Grand Cyrus, you had better come some day and make the acquaintance of Mademoiselle de Scudéry.’