It cannot be wondered at that on her return to Paris she shrank from renewing relations with old friends whose husbands numbered their legal posts by the score and who drove about in fine coaches, ruthlessly bespattering humble pedestrians with the foul mud of Paris. But for Madeleine’s sake she put her pride in her pocket, and though some ignored her overtures, others welcomed her back with genial condescension.
The day that this story begins, the Troquevilles were going to dine with the celebrated Madame Pilou, famous in ‘la Cour et la Ville’ for her homespun wit and remarkably ill-favoured countenance—it would be difficult to say of which of these two distinctions she was most proud herself. Her career had been a social miracle. Though her husband had been only a small attorney, there was not a Princess or Duchess who did not claim her as an intimate friend, and many a word of counsel had she given to the Regent herself.
None of her mother’s old acquaintanceships did Madeleine urge her so eagerly to renew as the one with Madame Pilou. In vain her mother assured her that she was just a coarse, ugly old woman.
‘So also are the Three Fates,’ said Jacques Tronchet (a nephew of Madame Troqueville, who had come to live with them), and Madeleine had looked at him, surprised and startled.
Madame Pilou dined at midday, so Monsieur Troqueville and Jacques were to go to her house direct from the Palais de Justice independently of Madame Troqueville and Madeleine. Madeleine had been ready a full half-hour before it was time to start. She had sat in the little parlour for a quarter of an hour absolutely motionless. She was dressed in her best clothes, a bodice of crimson serge, and an orange petticoat of camelot de Hollande, the slender purse’s substitute for silk. A gauze neckerchief threw a transparent veil over the extreme décolletage of her bodice. On her head was one of the new-fashioned ténèbres, a square of black crape that tied under her chin, and took the place of a hat. She wore a velvet mask and patches, in spite of the Sumptuary Laws, which would reserve them for ladies of rank, and from behind the mask her clear gray eyes, that never smiled and seldom blinked, looked out straight in front of her. Her hands were folded on her lap. She had a remarkable gift for absolute stillness.
At the end of a quarter of an hour, she went to her mother, who was preparing a cress salad in the kitchen, and said in a quiet, tense voice:—
‘Maybe you would liefer not go to Madame Pilou’s this morning. If so, tell me, and I will abandon it,’ then, with a sudden access of fury, ‘You will make me hate you—you are for ever sacrificing matters of moment to trifles. An you were to weigh the matter rightly, my having some pleasure when I was young would seem of greater moment than there being a salad for supper!’
‘Madame Pilou dines at twelve, and it is but a bare half-hour from our house to hers, and it is now eleven,’ Madame Troqueville answered slowly, emphasising each word. ‘But we will start now without fail, if ’tis your wish, and arrive like true Provincials half an hour before we are due;’ irritation now made the words come tumbling out, one on the top of the other. Madeleine began to smile, and her mother went on with some heat, but no longer with irritation.
‘But why in the name of Jesus do you lash yourself into so strange a humour before going to old Madame Pilou’s? One would think you were off to the Palais Cardinal to wait on the Regent! She is but a plain old woman; now if she were very learned, or——’