“Very likely,” replied Madame de Beaumanoir, “and my niece is the very woman for it. Michelle has the worst combination that ever the devil devised for a woman: she has love and ambition in a high degree. God made those two qualities, but the devil mixed ’em. ’Tis well enough to have one. I had ambition, but with no nonsense about love; the Queen, on the contrary, can love, and would give up the throne of the universe for that poor doddering old—”
“Madam! Madam!” cried Roger, raising his hand. Berwick colored, but remained silent.
“I ’an’t said it,” replied Madame de Beaumanoir, with a wink of her bright eyes. “I say, though, that my niece knows not what she will be at. She can marry a princeling if she wants to, being herself what they call a princess of the Holy Roman Empire. God knows what any woman wants with any sort of man but a good, gallant, fighting, drinking, swearing Englishman,—but my lady has the bee of a great marriage in her bonnet. At the same time she hopes and expects, and certainly will love like a hurricane; and you will see what comes of it. I have lived long and much, having been, as you know, at the court of blessed King Charles, but never saw I the woman who was swayed this way by love and that way by ambition, who did not have vast vicissitudes in love and life.”
Roger, not being prepared with an opinion on this point, held his tongue; but Madame de Beaumanoir continued with an increased vigor,—
“Michelle is reckoned a beauty. She is not; but she is one of those women who befool the world into thinking them extraordinary handsome, and then proceed to befool it in every other way. She is over fond of reading and writing and wandering in sequestered places, and riding far and fast, with François only for an escort. And she affects old men and ecclesiastics, and thinks about things that no young and handsome girl need think about. However,” the old lady abruptly concluded, “all this is nothing to you—for my Princess regards a commoner, albeit he is an English gentleman who dates back to the Saxon heptarchy, very much as you regard any humble creature who serves you, but who is as far below you as the steeple of St. Denis is above the earth.”
“Or as I regard Bess Lukens,” thought Roger, not much interested in all Madame de Beaumanoir had said. Just then the old lady caught sight of François, sitting a little off in a corner with a book which he had taken out of his breast-pocket, and reaching over, Madame de Beaumanoir brought her fan down on his luckless head with a whack.
“That’s for reading sermons in company,” cried this terrible old lady. “You never see Berwick or this pretty fellow Egremont reading sermons, do you?”
“’Tis a volume of Queen Margaret’s ‘Heptameron,’” replied François, in an injured voice,—“the very naughtiest book I could find in Paris!”
This mollified the old Duchess, and she returned to the charge with Berwick, who seemed to relish her society. Roger Egremont noted that the old lady, after all, was a person of extreme shrewdness of apprehension, and not in any way bad at heart. But every word he had heard of this Princess Michelle had set him against her, and he felt not the slightest curiosity to see her.
The levee was not late that night, all being eager for the next day’s festivity, and by sunrise next morning, Roger, in his attic at the inn, which he shared with Dicky, was wakened by the merry clamor in the streets of the little town.