‘You have not a chair, have you, Mademoiselle?’
‘Here it is, father,’ said Angélique, who was bringing one up.
‘Ah! that is right, Mademoiselle er ... er ... er ... will sit here.’
Madeleine took to this kind, polite man, and felt a little happier. He sat down beside her and made a few remarks, which Madeleine, full of the will to be agreeable, answered as best she could, endeavouring to make up by pleasant smiles for her sudden lack of esprit. But, unfortunately, the Marquis was almost stone-blind, so the smiles were lost upon him, and before long Madeleine noticed by his absent laugh and amused expression that his attention was wandering to the conversation of the others.
‘I am of opinion you would look inexpressibly galant in a scarlet hat, Marquis,’ Madame de Rambouillet was saying to a short, swarthy man with a rather saturnine expression. They all looked at him mischievously. ‘Julie would be obliged to join Yvonne in the Convent, but there would be naught to hinder you from keeping Marie-Julie at your side as your adopted daughter.’ The company laughed a little, the laugh of people too thoroughly intimate to need to make any effort. ‘Monsieur de Grasse is wearing his episcopal smile—look at him, pray! Come, Monseigneur, you must confess that a scarlet hat would become him to a marvel,’ and Madame de Rambouillet turned her brilliant, mischievous eyes on a tiny prelate with a face like a naughty schoolboy’s.
He had been called Monsieur de Grasse. Could he, then, be the famous Godeau, bishop and poet? It seemed impossible. For Saint Thomas is the patron saint of provincials when they meet celebrities in the flesh.
‘I fear Monsieur’s head would be somewhat too large to wear it with comfort,’ he answered.
‘Hark to the episcopal fleurette! Marquis, rise up and bow!’ but the only answer from the object of these witticisms was a surly grunt. Another idle smile rippled round the circle, and then there fell a silence of comfortable intimacy. If Madeleine had suddenly found herself in the kingdom of Prester John she could not have understood less of what was going on around her.
‘Madame Cornuel has a furiously galante historiette she is burning to communicate to us,’ said Mademoiselle de Rambouillet, screwing up her eyes at Madame Cornuel.
‘Julie, bid Monsieur de Grasse go upstairs to play with Marie-Julie, and then Madame Cornuel will tell it.’