‘So that she is reduced to sell oranges?’ said Nadine. ‘How very touching! Othmar will purchase immediately several bales.’
‘No, she does not sell oranges,’ said Melville, ‘but perhaps she is more to be pitied than those who do. A great name and no dower—it is to have silver bells to your shoes but no stockings inside them.’
‘Surely she must have stockings, I mean relations?’
‘Only very distant ones. She is a far-off cousin of your friend and neighbour the Duchesse de Vannes, who brings her up; that is, sends her to her convent, pays for her frocks, and allows her to pass her holidays at one of de Vannes’ country-houses. I do not know that we could reasonably expect the Duchesse to do more, only there are two ways of doing a thing, and she does not do this in the best possible manner.’
‘Cri-Cri cannot love a very pretty girl of sixteen, it would not be in nature, certainly not in her nature,’ said the Princess, with one of her moments of frankness. ‘I imagine they will make her embrace the religious life; what else can they do with her?’
‘It is what they will probably end with,’ said Melville, with a tinge of sadness. ‘It is hard for a girl of noble blood and no dower to end otherwise in France. The men who ought to marry her, her equals, will marry instead some Americans with dollars, whose fathers were stokers or pork-butchers.’
‘But are there no other de Valogne?’
‘None; she is the last of a family which was as extravagant as it was distinguished. Othmar may have heard of her father, the last Comte de Valogne; he was a viveur enragé, and finished the little that had been left by Count Gui, the hero of Versailles, and the fortune of his wife as well, who was a De Creusac. She died in childbed. Her mother had the care of the child, and he went on with his life of pleasure until he broke his neck riding at La Marche. The old Marquise de Creusac, when she also died, could not leave her granddaughter a farthing. The de Creusac had been ruined in the Revolution, and the sons of the Marquise, who would never have anything to do with their brother-in-law, were both killed in the war of ‘70. There was no one left but the Duchesse de Vannes, who was a third cousin of de Valogne, to do anything. She took the child in her charge, as I have said, and has behaved admirably, in the letter of charity, if something has been lacking of the spirit. So long as the girl is being educated the thing is easy; but when the time comes when she must leave her convent, as she will have to do in two years’ time, the problem will not be so easy of solution; they will have to decide on her future; at present her fate has been easily settled, but soon the terrible question will arise,—who will marry her without a dower? I believe they mean to make her enter the religious life, as you said; for the men who probably would marry her for sake of alliance with the de Vannes, will be those with whom the de Vannes would utterly refuse to ally themselves.’
‘A convent! Good heavens, for a child like a Greuze picture!’ exclaimed Othmar.
Melville added sadly: