Monsieur Gérondif smiled graciously at the count, murmuring with an air of modesty:
“I write verse rather easily, but I never wrote a tragedy, that is sure, certainly.”
“I beg pardon, monsieur, I took you for Master André; you have much affinity with him.—But let us drink to monsieur le marquis’s health, and to the pleasure of having him in Paris at last.”
Daréna’s proposition was eagerly welcomed; the glasses were filled with madeira, and emptied in Chérubin’s honor; the four dancers drank without heel-taps, and poured down madeira in a way to arouse an Englishman’s envy.
Meanwhile Monsieur Poterne, having been cheated out of the seat to which he aspired, had decided to remain on his feet and to assist Jasmin, in preference to retiring. So he took his stand behind Daréna; but while making a pretence of passing him a plate now and then, he asked him in undertones for whatever he saw on the table. Daréna passed him well filled dishes, and Poterne, instead of serving them to the guests, turned his back and rapidly made away with the contents.
The beginning of the repast was lively, but free from anything offensive to the proprieties; the young women, upon whom Daréna had enjoined the most rigidly correct behavior, gave their whole attention to doing justice to the dinner, and maintained an irreproachable demeanor, although they bestowed an amiable smile on Chérubin from time to time. Malvina alone let slip an occasional remark or jest of a somewhat obscene flavor; but Daréna always made haste to cover it by beginning to talk. His conversation, which was always piquant or rambling, Monfréville’s, who was in an unusually cheerful mood, and the quotations of Monsieur Gérondif, who, while eating for four, found time to display all that he knew, did not leave Chérubin a moment for reflection. Surprised to find himself the hero of that impromptu fête, he was dazzled, fascinated, taken captive; the glances that were darted at him, the witty remarks that he heard on all sides, the flattering things that were said to him, and the delicious, dainty, toothsome dinner, which gratified his sense of smell and of taste alike, prevented him from giving a thought to the village; for when his face became grave and indicated the arrival of a memory, his companions redoubled their attentions, their gayety and their pranks, to banish the cloud that had dimmed his eyes.
“I say,” suddenly exclaimed Malvina, who, as she turned her head, happened to see Monsieur Poterne taking away a plate that Daréna passed him, “so your man of business waits on you at table, does he? Is he your servant too?”
“He serves me in every capacity,” said Daréna; “I tell you he is an invaluable man; I make whatever I choose of him!”
“Then you’d better make a good-looking man of him!”
“Socrates, Horace, Cicero and Pelisson were hideously ugly,” said Gérondif, filling the little Swiss maiden’s glass; “a man may be very plain and still have a brilliant intellect.”