Let us change the scene.
It is 1778, exactly twenty-one years after the events recorded as having happened at Fort William Henry. We are now in France, in the sunny province of Guienne, and near the gay city of Bordeaux.
A lady, young and beautiful, is seated at one of the lofty open windows of the turreted Chateau de Fontbrune, which crowns the summit of a wooded eminence on the right bank of the Garonne. Her eyes and hair are dark; her complexion soft and brilliant. Her attire, as she is in the country, partakes of the picturesque fashion of the last days of Louis XV. She reclines on a velvet fauteuil, and forcibly reminds us of a languid little beauty in one of Watteau's pictures waiting for some one to make love to her. As a poet of the time has it, her attire
"Was whimsically traversed o'er,
Here a knot and there a flower;
Like her little heart that dances,
Full of maggots—full of fancies;
Flowing loosely down her back,
Fell with art the graceful sacque;
Ornamented well with gimping,
Flounces, furbelows, and crimping,
While her ruffles, many a row,
Guard her elbows, white as snow,
Knots below and points above,
Emblem of the ties of love."
Her cheek rested on her hand, and heedless of the too familiar splendour of the apartment in which she was seated, she impatiently drew back the blue satin hangings, which were festooned by cords and tassels of silver, and setting her round dimpled chin into the white palm of her pretty little hand, gazed languidly upon the beautiful landscape that spread, as it were, at her feet.
The vine-covered district of the Bordelais, through which wound the Garonne; Bourdeaux, clustering on its left bank in the form, of a crescent, with its old walls and towers of the Middle Ages; its nineteen gates, through which the tide of human life was ebbing and flowing; its long rows of trees casting their lengthening shadows to the eastward; the huge grey ramparts of the venerable Chateau de Trompette; the palace of the Dukes of Guienne; the church of St. Michel and the cathedral of St. André, with its two tall and splendid spires, which pierced the saffron-tinted sky like stone needles; and then the majestic river sweeping past towards the sea, all bathed in the broad light of a glorious June sunset. But Therese had seen all this a thousand times before, and it ceased to interest her now.
In the lap of this noble lady reposed a pretty, but saucy and snubnosed Bologna spaniel, with the long ears and black silky hair of which the white fingers of one hand played involuntarily. Statues, bronzes, buhl tables, vases of flowers, and a hundred beautiful trifles, decorated this little room, which was her boudoir—her own peculiar sanctum sanctorum—and the windows of which overlooked a bastion, whereon were sixteen antique brass cannon; for the Chateau de Fontbrune, in which we have now the honour of finding ourselves, was an old baronial house, which, after being fortified by Louis de Foix, had given shelter to Charles VII., and been beleaguered by the Maréchal de Matignon.
The productions of the popular men of the day strewed the apartment. The poems of Bernis, the comedies of the Abbé Boissy, the music of Lulli, with drawings and pictures without end, lay near, while a vaudeville by Panard was open upon the piano. Mademoiselle had evidently been sorely puzzled in her efforts to get through the long hours of this day of June, 1778.
"Oh, Nanon!" she exclaimed to her attendant, a pretty girl of eighteen, who sat near her on a tabourette, sewing; "I am so ennuyé—for in this dreary old chateau, which I am not permitted to leave, and to which no one comes but prosy old colonels and stupid magistrates, such as M. le Maire, or M. le Maitre du Palais, or still worse, those horrid counsellors of the Court of Admiralty, there is so little to rouse one from sad thoughts and drowsy lethargy."
"Try another chapter of that new romance by M. de Marivaux."