The Last Duchess of Belgarde

by Molly Elliot Seawell

THE gayety and racketing went on during the whole year at one place or another—the Château de Belgarde, other châteaus, Paris and Versailles. Trimousette saw Madame de Valençay oftener than any other woman of her acquaintance. Madame de Valençay was fairly polite, but in her eyes and smile lurked a kind of insolence which the reticent young duchess understood quite well, but of which she made not the slightest sign. She had no more liberty and not much more money as Duchess of Belgarde than when she lived in her grandmother’s house as a little demoiselle. There was much to buy and to give, and besides, ever since King Louis the Sixteenth called the States General together, the peasants had refused to pay their rents and even their taxes, and the work people demanded their money with threats and curses. So far from having a thousand louis d’ors with which to pay Victor’s debts, the poor little duchess had only managed, by skimping and saving in her own personal expenses, to scrape together three hundred louis—and it was so little she was ashamed to offer it to Victor.

A year after her marriage Trimousette disappointed and offended the duke very much by bringing into the world a daughter. A son would have been welcomed; but a girl—well, the poor little thing, as if knowing she was not wanted by anyone except her young mother, soon wailed her life away. Trimousette grieved as one whose heart was broken, and wore nothing but black. This still more annoyed the duke, but on this point alone Trimousette showed a slight obstinacy. The duke wished her to go about, to visit Versailles, to be seen at the theatre. The young duchess humbly obeyed these instructions, but not in the spirit the duke desired. Trimousette’s heart, poor lonely captive, beat against its prison bars, and made its melancholy cry a little heard; then grew silent.

She led a life singularly lonely for a great lady who received twice in the week, and who went to a ball nearly every night. Her grandmother thought she had done enough in marrying Trimousette off to one of the greatest dukes in France, and gave herself up to sermons, taking no more thought of her granddaughter. Victor had his own amusements, as became an officer of the Queen’s Musketeers and a gay dog. Only the poor, broken-legged hound Diane seemed to seek Trimousette’s company, and together the two creatures who loved the duke listened for his footsteps, and hung timidly upon his words.

But there was so great a noise of other things in Paris that private woes were not much heeded. It was impossible for a lady to walk without molestation upon the streets full of turbulent people, and it was actually dangerous to drive about in a ducal coach. The pavements were thronged by hungry creatures, both men and women, with menacing eyes, and threatening, yelling voices, who had been known to scream and flout ladies in their carriages, and to drag gentlemen from their horses and maltreat them. Once Madame de Valençay, seeing Trimousette preparing to go forth somewhat unwillingly in her coach, hinted that perhaps the duchess was afraid.

“Not in the least, madame,” answered Trimousette quietly. “Perhaps you will join me in my coach and drive with me to the Palais Royal.”

Madame de Valençay was so stunned by this proposal that she accepted it, the duke standing by and wondering if his taciturn young duchess had not lost her wits.

The two ladies were assisted into the coach, which set off toward the Palais Royal. It was about seven in the evening when the work of the day was over and the streets were fullest of these ragged, starving beings who had found voice at last, and shouted out the story of their rags, their hunger, their misery, and their determination to punish somebody for it. The splendid coach and six of the Duchess of Belgarde was like showing a red rag to a bull. The mob surrounded it, hooting and screaming, and wrenched the whips from the hands of the coachmen and postilions, and the canes from the three footmen hanging on behind. Madame de Valençay, who had started out laughing and defiant, grew pale and then frightened, and when a wretched woman, with the glare of famine in her eyes, dragged the coach door open and tore the ribbons from Madame de Valençay’s hat, that lady fell to whimpering and almost fainting with terror. Not so little Trimousette. It had been complained of her often that she was too silent and impassive, and she remained so now, giving no sign whatever of fear or uneasiness. She even smiled with a faint contempt at Madame de Valençay’s terrors, and refused to give orders for the coachman to return to the Hôtel de Belgarde until they had made the circuit of the Palais Royal. When they returned, the duke was awaiting them in the courtyard of the hotel. He was wondering what would be the next miracle. Madame de Valençay had been so terribly scared that she could not disguise it, and clamored to have not only the duke, but all the men servants in the hotel to escort her home. She looked a wreck, did this beautiful, gayly gowned lady, with her hat in fragments, her fan broken, her clothes almost torn off her by the furious, yelling, laughing crowd of women in the streets. Not so Trimousette, in her sedate black gown, better suited to eighty than eighteen.

“I was not at all frightened,” she said to the duke, and if she had not been so shy, she would have told him all about it. The coachmen and footmen did this, however, and slyly, after the manner of their kind, brought the duchess’s calm courage into contrast with Madame de Valençay’s undignified screams and pleadings.

The duke, who was insensible to fear himself, expected courage in women, and was secretly disgusted with Madame de Valençay. Besides, like most ladies of her sort, she was beginning to hound the duke with what she called her love. It had grown more insistent since his marriage to the quiet little Trimousette, who appeared not to know there was such a thing as faithlessness in the world. The duke chafed a little under Madame de Valençay’s shameless pursuit of him. Not being a courageous woman she did not venture into the streets when the people became turbulent; but they were not always turbulent, the poor, starving people. Although herself often afraid to go out, Madame de Valençay did not mind sending out her running footmen, and the Duke of Belgarde could scarcely leave his own door without a lackey in Madame de Valençay’s livery poking a scented pink note at him. The duke ground his teeth, and dimly recognized that his friend, as he called her, harassed and worried him, and indeed hen-pecked him more in two weeks than his pale, quiet little duchess had done in the whole two years of their married life. Nevertheless, Madame de Valençay’s glorious and vivid beauty enchanted him, and made him sometimes forget Trimousette’s very existence. He even forgot to compliment her little feet, which Trimousette still, with a faint, foolish hope in her heart, dressed in charming little shoes, the only patch of coquetry or vanity about her.

The people, meanwhile, were growing more and more unruly, and at last one day a mob of dressmakers, washerwomen, cooks, and the like, headed by a tall, red-faced laundress, almost as fierce as the old Countess of Floramour, began a round of domiciliary visits to persons who owed them money. They went to many hotels, including that of Madame de Valençay, who ordered all the doors to be double locked, and ran up to her bedroom, where she remained cowering and terrified, but unable to escape the menaces and shouts of the crowd of haggard, savage women in the courtyard, demanding their money to keep their children from starving. They got nothing, however.