I left him in his room, alone with his grief and his remorse. I went to my own. At my writing table sat Gaston Cheverny, writing, his tears dropping upon the paper. I believe everybody in Paris wept when Adrienne Lecouvreur died.
“I am writing an account for Mademoiselle Capello,” he said; then laid down his pen, when he saw by my face what had happened.
Four days later Adrienne Lecouvreur was buried at midnight. I was among the few at her interment. Monsieur Voltaire managed it all, with a delicacy, a tenderness inexpressible. Those who say that man could not love, knew not the nobility of his love for Adrienne Lecouvreur. When her will was opened it was found that nearly all of her property was left to the poor.
The death of Adrienne Lecouvreur made an epoch with my master. Except her, he had not been fortunate in the women he had known best; and there were no more, for him, like Mademoiselle Lecouvreur. He 209 never again spoke to the Duchesse de Bouillon. In that, he was unfailingly true to the memory of the woman who had loved him so well.
This was in March of 1730. It seemed to me as if the days were growing heavier, and Paris drearier, every week that passed. Not that Paris is reckoned a dreary town; particularly in the spring and summer, when everything is in full leaf and flower, and the whole population is out of doors all day in the yellow sunshine and half the night under the laughing moon and merry-twinkling stars—for the people of Paris think that the moon was made for their chief torch-bearer, and that the stars were set in the sky that Paris might be supplied with a handsome set of girandoles. But I was not of that mind. For a long time after Mademoiselle Lecouvreur’s death, Count Saxe never spoke her name. He longed to be away from Paris. In June, the King of Saxony, his father, was to form a great camp at Radewitz, and Count Saxe, to his satisfaction, was invited to attend. So, preparing for that event, in which he was to take a considerable part, gave him some distraction during that sad springtime of 1730. I wished him to leave Paris, too. I never thought the air of that town agreed with his constitution.
Gaston Cheverny, as became a young man whose blood runs quick and red, liked the springtime. He had not enough money to go to court often, which he would have liked, so he put up with humbler pleasures. I do not believe he could, to save his life, pass one of those impromptu balls on the corner of the street, where the people, young and old, dance to a 210 pipe or a fiddle. He always joined in, and as he danced with grace and skill, the little milliners’ girls and the merry old women always liked to have a fling with him.
We made many excursions on foot as well as on horseback, in those hours when Count Saxe had no need of me. We often loitered past the deserted garden of the Hôtel Kirkpatrick, where the lilacs and syringas drenched the air with perfume as on that spring afternoon, four years before. Gaston would say to me:
“See yonder balcony—it was from that balcony Francezka bade me good by. And look—the very guelder rose-bush by which I once spoke with her, on coming to pay my respects to Madame Riano! I can conjure up that charming Francezka as if she were before me now!”
So could I.
By the artful subterfuge of sending Madame Riano the news of Paris, for which she thirsted, Gaston had been lucky enough to keep in constant communication with the château of Capello. Madame Riano often used Francezka as her amanuensis, and I grew to know her clear, firm handwriting well. Her letters were written at Madame Riano’s dictation, but it was plain that Francezka managed to express in them her own thoughts as well as Madame Riano’s. She often spoke of Regnard Cheverny.