lady who stood with her face to it, was obliged to guess as each shadow passed whose it was.
Madame D’Hernilly’s daughters, and their young companions, exerted all their ingenuity to disguise their figures, that they might avoid being caught. At first they passed pretty quickly in succession, because they were not yet well acquainted with the game; but at the fifth or sixth game, when Madame D’Hernilly occupied the post facing the wall, they made use of all the little artifices they could think of to lead her into error. Ernestina, Adela, and Adriana, vied with each other in endeavours to disguise their shadows most effectually. Their postures were so whimsical, that Madame D’Hernilly could not succeed in discovering any one.
To increase the difficulties, they resolved to put a cheat upon her, and slily brought a young servant girl to take a part in the game without her knowledge. This girl presented herself at first with a gardener’s hat on; and presently afterwards, she put on the pouch and belt of the game-keeper, and clapped a villager’s cap upon her head. After that she crawled along upon her hands and feet with a postilion’s jack-boot upon her arms. Madame D’Hernilly was obliged to say that she “threw her tongue to the dogs.” This phrase is used to signify that you give up; and uncouth as it sounds in our
language, Madame de Sevigné has condescended to employ it in one of her most sprightly letters[3].
They deliberated upon the penance which they should inflict upon Madame D’Hernilly; and they agreed that she should be obliged to embrace those of the company whom she loved best, and that she must do it without making the others jealous. She tenderly embraced her daughters and their young friends; and though her preference for her daughters was too natural to be doubted, they did not perceive that there was any difference in her manner of caressing them, and their companions. She therefore fulfilled the express condition of the penance, which was in fact a pleasure, rather than a penance to her.
They then played one more game; Ernestina soon found herself in the same situation as Madame D’Hernilly, and she was consequently obliged to submit to a penance. They gave her a fable to read, of which the following lines form the concluding moral:
Sometimes smooth and sometimes rough,
Is the game of Blindman’s Buff.
Between the blind and those who see,
It oft produces treachery.