When the weather opened, Wanda took him and his brother to Versailles and Trianon, and told them more of that saddest of all earthly histories of fallen greatness. Gela sobbed aloud; Bela was silent and grew pale.
'I hate Paris,' he said very slowly, as they went back to it in the red close of the wintry afternoon.
'Do not hate Paris. Do not hate anything or anyone,' said his mother softly; 'but love your own home and your own people, and be grateful for them.'
Bela lifted his little cap and made the sign of the Cross, as he did when he saw anything holy. 'I am the Dauphin at home,' he thought; and he felt the tears in his eyes, though he never would cry as Gela did.
So she gave them her simples as antidotes to the city's poison, and occupied herself with her children, with the poor around her, with the various details of her distant estates, and paid but little heed to that artificial world which, when she heeded it, offended and irritated her. To please Sabran she went to a few great houses and to the opera, and gave many entertainments herself, happy that he was happy in it, but not otherwise interested in the life around her, or moved by the homage of it.
'It is much more my jewels than it is myself that they stare at,' she assured him, when he told her of the admiration which she elicited wherever she appeared. 'Believe me, if you put my pearls or my diamonds on Madame Chose or Baroness Niemand, they would gather and gaze quite as much.'
He laughed.
'Last night I think you wore no ornaments except a few tea-roses, and I saw them follow you just the same. It is very odd that you never seem to understand that you are a beautiful woman.'
'I am glad to be so in your eyes, if I never shall be in my own. As for that popularity of society, it never commended itself to me. It has too strong a savour of the mob.'
'When you are so proud to the world why are you so humble to me?'