‘The de Valogne was a great race, but impoverished long ago,’ said a Russian minister. ‘ I think, if he had married at all, he should have made an alliance which would have brought him that unassailably great rank which is usually the ambition of all financiers. For a man of his position to make a mere romantic mariage d’amour is absurd—out of place;—and who knows if it be even that?’ he pursued, with an involuntary glance at the Princess Napraxine.
‘Why on earth should we doubt it?’ said her husband. ‘It cannot be anything else, and they say the girl is quite beautiful. Surely, if anyone can afford to marry to please himself, that one is Othmar.’
‘At any rate, it is his own affair,’ said Nadine, in a voice which was clear and sweet, but cold as steel. ‘I cannot see why we should occupy ourselves about it, or why you should have announced it as if it were the dissolution of the world.’
‘Mademoiselle de Valogne is very beautiful,’ said Geraldine, ‘I have seen her once at Millo. Why should they pretend to hesitate?’
‘They hesitated because she is vouée à Marie,’ replied Napraxine, ‘and also the de Vannes and the de Creusac scarcely recognise the princes of finance as their equals. Still the marriage is magnificent; they felt they had no right to regret it since it fell to them from heaven.’
‘Do you still believe, Platon, that heaven has anything to do with marriage?’ said his wife, with her little significant smile; a slight colour had come upon her cheeks, tinging them as blush-roses are tinged with the faintest flush; her eyes retained their astonished and annoyed expression, of which her husband saw nothing.
‘Heaven made mine at least,’ he said, with his unfailing good-humour, and a bow in which there was some grace.
‘Louis Quatorze could not have answered better,’ said Nadine. ‘I cannot say I see the hand of heaven myself in it, but if you do, so much the better. "Les illusions sont des zéros, mais c’est avec les zéros qu’on fait les beaux chiffres."’
‘I do not know whether Mademoiselle de Valogne has illusions, but her settlements will certainly have de beaux chiffres,’ continued Napraxine, who was still full of the tidings he had brought. ‘Did Othmar say nothing to you the other morning of what he intended to do?’