‘Oh, mother, let her be, and go and make your toilette,’ and Madame Troqueville went off obediently to her room.
Madeleine paced about like a restive horse until her mother was ready, but did not dare to disturb her while she was dressing. It used to surprise Madeleine that she should take such trouble over such unfashionable toilettes.
It was not long before she came in quite ready. She began to put Madeleine’s collar straight, which, for some reason, annoyed Madeleine extremely. At last they were out of the house.
Madame Pilou lived on the other side of the river, in the rue Saint Antoine, so there was a good walk before Madeleine and her mother, and judging from Madeleine’s gloomy, abstracted expression, it did not promise to be a very cheerful one.
They threaded their way into the rue des Augustins, a narrow, cloistered street flanked on the left by the long flat walls of the Monastery, over which were wafted the sound of bells and the scent of early Spring. It led straight out on to the Seine and the peaceful bustle of its still rustic banks. They crossed it by the Pont-Neuf, that perennial Carnival of all that Paris held of most picturesque and most disreputable. The bombastic eloquence of the quacks extolling their panaceas and rattling their necklaces of teeth; the indescribable foulness of the topical songs in which hungry-looking bards celebrated to sweet ghostly airs of Couperin and Cambert the last practical joke played by the Court on the Town, or the latest extravagance of Mazarin; the whining litany of the beggars; the plangent shrieks of strange shrill birds caught in American forests—all these sounds fell unheard on at least one pair of ears.
On they hurried, past the booths of the jugglers and comedians and the stalls of the money-lenders, past the bronze equestrian statue of Henri IV., watching with saturnine benevolence the gambols of the Gothic vagabonds he had loved so dearly in life, cynically indifferent to the discreet threats of his rival the water-house of the Samaritaine, which, classical and chaste, hinted at a future little to the taste of the Vert Gallant and his vagabonds.
From time to time Madame Troqueville glanced timidly at Madeleine but did not like to break the silence. At last, as they walked down the right bank of the Seine, the lovely town at once substantial and aerial, taking the Spring as blithely as a meadow, filled her with such joy that she cried out:—
‘’Tis a delicate town, Paris! Are not you glad we came, my pretty one?’
‘Time will show if there be cause for gladness,’ Madeline answered gloomily.
‘There goes a fine lady! I wonder what Marquise or Duchesse she may be!’ cried Madame Troqueville, wishing to distract her. Madeleine smiled scornfully.