“Look!” they said; “such a good brother! Mademoiselle boasts that although he is fifty-four years of age he is still as obedient to her as he was at fifteen. So prosperous and respected as an advocate, too!” And all these ladies sighed because they had not succeeded in petticoating a brother or a husband as Mademoiselle Bouchard had petticoated the prosperous and respected Monsieur Paul Bouchard.
Pierre, the husband of Élise, Mademoiselle Bouchard’s maid for thirty years, was as well disciplined as his master, for he was Monsieur Paul’s valet. He had never had a will of his own since the day, thirty years before, when Élise had sworn before the altar to love, honor and obey him.
The third masculine creature in the dovecote of the Rue Clarisse was the parrot, Pierrot. Nobody knew exactly how old Pierrot was, but he was supposed to have arrived at years of discretion. Mademoiselle had spent a dozen patient years in curing Pierrot of a propensity to bad language, and she had taught him a great variety of moral maxims that made him a model bird, as Monsieur Bouchard was a model man and Pierre a model servant. It is true that Léontine de Meneval, Monsieur Paul’s ward, married to a handsome scapegrace captain of artillery, had amused herself with teaching the bird a number of phrases, such as “Bad boy Bouchard” and others reflecting on “Papa Bouchard,” as she called him. And Pierrot had picked up these naughty expressions with astonishing quickness. But Léontine had always been regarded as incorrigible by her guardian and his sister, although they really loved her, and since her marriage she had become gayer, merrier and more irresponsible than ever. This deterioration both Monsieur and Mademoiselle Bouchard laid at the door of her husband, Captain de Meneval, with his laughing eyes and devil-may-care manner; with whom, however, aside from these characteristics, not the slightest fault could be found. He was devoted to Léontine, and if the two chose to lead a life as merry and unreflecting as that of the birds in the shadowy forests, nobody could stop them. Papa Bouchard—as the artillery captain had the impudence to call him—did, it is true, keep a tight hand on Léontine’s fortune, and would allow her only half her income, at which Léontine grumbled and incited Captain de Meneval to grumble, too. But Papa Bouchard, having full power as trustee, met their complaints and protests with a proposition to cut down their allowance to one-fourth of their income, at which the two young people grew frightened, and desisted.
Now, there dwells in every masculine breast a germ of lawlessness that no discipline ever invented can wholly kill. Man or parrot, it is the same. After having been brought up in the way he should go, he longs to go it. Such was the case with Pierrot, with Pierre and with Monsieur Bouchard.
It was the bird that first made a dash for liberty. After ten years of irreproachable conduct, Pierrot, on that June morning, suddenly jumped from the balcony, where he had been walking the railing in the most sedate manner, and scuttled off in the direction of the Alcazar d’Été, the Ambassadeurs, the Moulin Rouge, and the very gayest quarter of Paris.
Monsieur Bouchard was sitting on the balcony at the time. He was rather younger looking, with his clean-shaven face and wiry figure, than most men of his age, but thanks to Mademoiselle Céleste, he patronized the same tailors that had made for his father and his grandfather. Their cut and style indicated that they had been tailors to Cardinal Richelieu and others of that time, and they dressed Monsieur Bouchard in coats and trousers and waistcoats of the pliocene age of tailoring. As for his hats, they might have been dug out of Pompeii, for any modernity they had, and the result was that Monsieur Bouchard’s back and legs looked about seventy-five, while his face looked little more than forty.
Instead of giving the alarm when Pierrot trotted gaily off, Monsieur Bouchard felt a strange thrill of sympathy with the runaway.
“Poor devil!” thought he. “No doubt he is sick of the Rue Clarisse—tired of the moral maxims—weary of the whole business. He isn’t so young as he was, but there’s a good deal of life in him still”—Pierrot was just scampering around the corner—“and he wants to see life.”
