After which he said to the group of women, many of whom were sobbing around him, some with fear of what they were about to encounter, and some with joy at losing at last, their horrible, hateful iron burdens.
"Do not weep. Do not weep. Already is our once bright, joyous city a vale of tears. Nay, there can be, I think, no more tears left for us to shed. I myself can weep no more. I who, in the last week, have buried my wife, my two daughters, and my little infant babe."
"Oh! oh!" gasped Marion and Laure and all the women standing round who heard the bereaved man's words. "Oh! Unhappy man. Unhappy man!"
[CHAPTER XVII]
AN ARISTOCRATIC RESORT
The little watering-place of Eaux St. Fer, which stood on the slope of a hill some few leagues outside Montpelier, and nearer than that city to the southern sea-board, was very full this summer; so full, indeed, that hardly could the visitors to it be accommodated with the apartments they required. So full that, already it had incurred the displeasure of many of those patrons--who were mostly of the ancient nobility of France--at their being forced to rub shoulders with, and also live cheek by jowl with, such common persons as--to go no lower--those of the upper bourgeoisie. Yet it had to be done--the doing of it could not be avoided; for this very year the waters of Eaux St. Fer had bubbled forth a degree warmer than they had ever been known to do before; they tasted more of saltpetre than any visitor could recollect their having done previously, and tasted also more unutterably nauseous; while marvellous cures of gout and rheumatism, and complaints brought on by overeating and overdrinking and late hours, as well as other indulgences, were reported daily. Even at this very moment the gossips staying at The Garland (the fashionable hostelry) were relating how Madame la Marquise de Montesprit, who was noted for eating a pâté of snipe every night of her life for supper, was already free from pain and able to sit up in her bed and play piquet with the Abbé Leri, whose carbuncles were fast disappearing from his face; while, too, the Chevalier Rancé d'Irval had lost eight pounds of his terrible weight, and the Vicomtesse de Fraysnes had announced that in another week she would actually appear without her veil, so much improved was her complexion. Likewise, it was whispered that, only a day or so before, three casks of the atrociously tasting water had been sent up to Paris to no less a person than the Regent himself.
Wherefore Eaux St. Fer was full to suffocation; dukes, duchesses, and all the other members of what was even then called the old régime, were huddled together pell-mell with bankers, merchants, even eminent shopkeepers and tradesmen; and, except that in the principal alley, or walk, it was understood that the nobility kept to one side of it, and those whom they termed the "refuse" to the other, one could hardly have told which were the people who boasted the blood of centuries in their veins, and which were those who, if they knew who their grandfathers were, knew no more. And, after all, when one's blood is corrupted by every indulgence that human weakness can give way to until the body is like a barrel, and the legs are like bolsters, and the face is a mass of swollen impurity, or as white as that of a corpse within its shroud, it matters very little whether that blood is drawn from ancestors who fought at Ascalon and Jerusalem or peddled vulgar wares in the lowest purlieus of cities.
"Mon ami!" exclaimed one of the high-born dames, who kept to the right side of the alley, to an aristocrat who sat on a bench beneath a tree close by where one of the fountains of Eaux St. Fer bubbled forth its waters, "Mon ami, you do not look well this morning. Yet see how the sun shines around; observe how it shows the wrinkles beneath the eyes of Mademoiselle de Ste. Ange over there, and also the paint on the face of the old Marquis de Pontvert. You should be gay, mon ami, this morning."
"I am not well," replied the personage whom she addressed. "Neither in health nor mind. Sometimes I wish I were a soldier again, living a life of----"
"Neither in health nor mind!" the lady who had accosted him repeated. "Come, now. That is not as it should be. Let us see. Tell me your symptoms. First, for the health. What ails that?" and, as she asked the question, she peered into the man's dull eyes with her own large clear ones. Then she continued, "Remember, Monsieur le Duc, that, although an arrangement once subsisting between us will never come to a settlement now, we are still to be very good--friends. Is it not so?" Yet, even as she asked the question, especially as she mentioned the word "friends," she turned her face away from him on the pretence of flicking off some dust from her farthest sleeve, and smiled, while biting her full, red nether lip with her brilliantly white teeth.