“Dear Fontainebleau! It is of all French palaces my favourite. I always envy Diana of Poitiers for having her cypher emblazoned all over that lovely gallery—Henri and Diane! Diane and Henri! Ah, me!”
“You envy her a kind of notoriety which I do not covet for my wife!”
“You always take one au pied de la lettre; but seriously, Madame de Brézé was an honest woman compared with the lady who lodges by the Holbein Gate.”
“I admit that sin wears a bolder front than it did in the last century. Angela, can I find nothing for you in Paris?”
“No; I thank your lordship. You and sister are both so generous to me that I have lost the capacity to wish for anything.”
“And as Lewin crosses the Channel three or four times a year, I doubt we positively have the Paris fashions as soon as the Parisians themselves,” added Hyacinth.
“That is an agreeable hallucination with which Englishwomen have ever consoled themselves for not being French,” said De Malfort, who sat lolling against the marble balustrade, nursing the guitar on which he had been playing when Fareham interrupted their noontide idleness; “but your ladyship may be sure that London milliners are ever a twelvemonth in the rear of Paris fashions. It is not that they do not see the new mode. They see it, and think it hideous; and it takes a year to teach them that it is the one perfect style possible.”
“I was not thinking of kerchiefs or petticoats,” said Fareham. “You are a book-lover, sister, like myself. Can I bring you no books you wish for?”
“If there were a new comedy by Molière; but I fear it is wrong to read him, since in his late play, performed before the King at Versailles, he is so cruel an enemy to our Church.”
“A foe only to hypocrites and pretenders, Angela. I will bring you his Tartuffe, if it is printed; or still better, Le Misanthrope, which I am told is the finest comedy that was ever written; and the latest romance, in twenty volumes or so, by one of those lady authors Hyacinth so admires, but which I own to finding as tedious as the divine Orinda’s verses.”