“Au revoir, Mlle. Suzanne! M. Poufaille, au revoir!” Miss Rowrer said, not a little flattered to know, not a Charley, but a real and genuine bohemian.
With a final bow, Poufaille watched the party going away, in utter amazement at the possession of so much money.
“Vive la joie—and fried potatoes!” Suzanne said, by way of moral.
Soon Ethel and grandma, Will, the duke, and Caracal were lost in the distance.
“You would think Caracal was the chief of the party,” Suzanne remarked to Poufaille; “only look—you see nothing but him!”
Indeed, Caracal, who at first was abashed at not being allowed to tell the story of Adam and Eve, nor that of the false signature of the Luxembourg, became doubly amiable, and fished for compliments because of his courageous behavior toward Vieillecloche, a man with five corpses in his trail. Meanwhile, he went on explaining, endlessly, the pictures of the old masters. He greeted them as friends; he spoke familiarly of the painters, called them by their first names and their nicknames—the old Breughel—the young Teniers—“Van Ryn” for Rembrandt—and so on.
He told over the jokes about the Louvre Museum. It was a national lounge, heated in winter and the place for a siesta in summer. He attacked the curators, who were incompetent, to his thinking; and he cited the forged art objects bought for their weight in gold, crowns and coins and jewels, and the famous Holbein on a mahogany panel—the Louvre’s pride up to the day when, scratching it on the back, the words appeared: “Flor de Habaña—Lawyers’ Club Brand”!
The duke passed along heedlessly. The Louvre for him was, most of all, a place in which you can talk amid sumptuous decoration. His only real interest in painting was in the hall of the Italian primitives, before the St. Morgana of Botticelli.
“St. Morgana, my ancestress,” he said to Miss Rowrer.
He drew himself up as he pointed to the saint, amid the choir of angels, in a sky of gold above a fantastic landscape, where architecture and monuments were piled together. He seemed moved, especially when he explained to Miss Rowrer that he should definitively be obliged to go back to Morgania, that grave events were on the way, and that only the other evening he had had a diplomatic interview with his people’s delegates.