“Be careful with him, my child,” she said. “I can see through his designs: he is trying to compromise you. He is head over ears in debt and hunting for a fortune.... But haven’t you seen Guillaume? Wait for me here, I’ll bring him to you.”
Simare came up to Gilberte:
“I must apologize to you, madame; I shocked you just now.”
“No, no,” stammered Gilberte, driven to her wits’ end by this persistency, “only I thought I ought not to....”
He interrupted her:
“It was I who ought not. I couldn’t help it: I was talking, talking a little at random, lest I should say what I have no right to say, what lies deep down within myself, one of those involuntary sentiments....”
“I am so sorry, Mme. Armand,” cried the hostess, returning. “My son was a little tired and has gone up to his room.”
The musical and literary evening was over. But the resources of the la Vaudraye salon did not end there. Its frequenters prided themselves on knowing how to talk. And the conversation went by rule, of course, as everything went by rule in this society which, by the almost daily repetition of the same acts, had established habits as strong as immutable laws.
The licensed talkers were M. Beaufrelant, who, they said, cultivated the flowers of rhetoric with the same zeal and the same success as the flowers of the soil; Mme. de la Vaudraye, who specialized in literary discussions; M. Lartiste, who, as a printer, was naturally marked out for the loftiest philosophical speculations; M. Simare the elder, a remarkable spinner of anecdotes; and, lastly, M. Charmeron and his sister-in-law, Mme. Bottentuit, who found, in their morbid need for contradicting and disputing with each other, an inexhaustible source of opinions, witticisms and banter. Outside these privileged and, so to speak, official protagonists, it was very seldom that any one ventured to open his mouth.
Gilberte, who was beginning to feel terribly bored, listened without a word, which was taken for a sign of admiring deference. The truth is that this oratorical joust surprised her greatly. All these people, speaking turn and turn about, seemed to be pursuing so many different conversations, each of them thinking only of shining in the department that had devolved upon himself. M. Lartiste, who had talked his best on capital punishment, the subject in which he excelled, was answered by Mme. de la Vaudraye with a vigorous parallel between the respective merits of Victor Hugo and Lamartine, which parallel was duly refuted in a lyrical outburst from M. Beaufrelant on the bulbs of the double dahlia.