Moreover, the marquis was not left alone on earth; had he not his son to comfort him? His faithful retainer said to him one day:
“My dear master, think of your little Chérubin; he has no mother now; you certainly ought to have died before her, for you were much older, but things don’t always go as one expects! Madame la marquise is dead and you are alive; to be sure, you have the gout, but there are people whom it doesn’t carry away at once; you are a proof of it. Be a man, monsieur le marquis, and remember your son, of whom you will make a lusty blade, such as you used to be; for you were a famous young rake, monsieur, although no one would suspect it to look at you now.”
“What do you mean, Jasmin? Am I very much changed? Do I look as if I were impotent now?”
“I don’t say that, monsieur, but I do think that you would find it difficult to keep five or six appointments in the same day; and that is what often happened in the old days! Ah! what a lady-killer you were! Well, I have an idea that your son will take after you, that he too will send me with billets-doux. Ha! ha! I will carry them with great pleasure; I know all about slipping notes into ladies’ hands.”
“In other words, my poor fellow, you were forever making mistakes and blunders, and it wasn’t your fault that I wasn’t surprised and murdered a hundred times by jealous husbands or rivals.”
“Do you think so, monsieur? Oh! you are mistaken; it was so long ago that you have forgotten all about it.”
“After all,” rejoined Monsieur de Grandvilain, after a moment, “even if I should weep for the poor marchioness all the time, that would not bring her back to me. I must preserve myself for my son. Ah! only let me see him when he is twenty years old! That is all I ask.”
“The deuce! I should say so! You are not modest!” said Jasmin; “twenty added to the seventy you are now, would make you ninety!”
“Well, Jasmin, don’t men ever live to that age?”
“Oh! very seldom; but it may happen.”