Mademoiselle Blanche: A Novel

by John D. Barry

She smiled in reply; it was too cold for her to speak. He could see her breath steaming faintly through the veil.

He felt a curious desire to hear her voice again; he did not realize that her devotion to the Church made her seem more remote from him, but he had an unpleasant consciousness that his own lack of religious faith created a barrier between them.

In the church he kept glancing from the priest celebrating the mass, to her. She was absorbed in reading her prayer-book, and she did not once look up at him. He compared her as she appeared then with her appearance in the glamor of the circus ring. She was the same person, yet different. She represented to him a kind of miracle. How humble she was, how sweet and good, as she knelt there!

When the priest began to distribute the communion and Blanche left her seat and joined the throng approaching the altar, Jules was touched with a tenderness he had never felt before. He buried his face in his hands, and prayed that he might be made worthy of her. He did not dare pray for her love; a certain sense of shame at having neglected God and church for so many years, at having lived solely for his own gratification, kept him from that; but if he had examined his motives, he would have found that this was really what he was praying for. He deceived himself so easily that he instinctively felt that he might be able to deceive God too.

On leaving the church, Jules proposed that they go to a restaurant for breakfast. "We'll make a holiday of it," he said, "and drink to your Aunt Sophie's health."

But Blanche protested that Madeleine would expect them, and would be worried if she were not back by half-past nine.

"Then we'll go out at one o'clock. I'll take you over to Bertiny's, in the Champs Élysées. It's very gorgeous; the twins took me there once to celebrate Dufresne's luck when he won five hundred francs at the races."

Though the sun was shining, it was still very cold, and as they hurried to the little apartment Jules could see that she was trembling. Madeleine had prepared some hot coffee for them and some eggs, and over these they were very gay. Jules was in a particularly good humor, and Mademoiselle Blanche laughed at his jokes, though most of them she had heard before. She had a very pretty laugh, he thought,—like her mother's, though not so deep and gurgling. After breakfast her face flushed from her walk and she looked even prettier than she appeared in the church.

As Madeleine cleared away the table, Blanche began to water the flowers by the window, and Jules opened the copy of the Petit Journal that he had bought on the way from the church. He kept glancing up at Mademoiselle, however, and each time he looked at her he had a new sensation of pleasure. How domestic she looked in the little dress of gray wool that she had put on after her return from mass! She seemed to create an atmosphere of home around her. In her belt were the roses he had given her the night before, still fresh and sparkling with drops of water from her fingers. How good it was, he thought, that he could be with her like this! How lonely his own apartment would be to him when Madame Perrault came back! He almost wished that she would never return, that she would marry Monsieur Berthier, and they might go on in this way forever. He laughed at the thought, and just then Mademoiselle turned her head.

"Monsieur seems to be amused," she said. "What is he smiling at?"