“Why?” the man answered in a sad tone. “Because I will trust no one but myself to make the child what her mother has not been ... a good woman! But excuse me, would you be so kind as rock Cecily for a little?... I’m wanted on the line.”
Will it ever be known what the young Queen of Bohemia thought about that winter night when she nursed a poor gate-keeper’s child for a whole hour, while the general and the baroness, whose help she had refused, sat mightily offended by the fire? When the guard opened the door and called, “Come, ladies and gentlemen, the express is about to start again ... all aboard!” the Queen laid her purse well filled with gold, and the bunch of violets from her waist, on little Cecily’s cradle, then she climbed back into the carriage.
But her Majesty spent only two days in Paris; she went back at once to Prague, from which she is scarcely ever absent now, and where she devotes herself entirely to her son’s education. The governesses with thirty quarterings who used to cast the shadow of their funereal head-gear over the infancy of the Heir Apparent have only sinecures now. If there are still kings in Europe when little Ladislas has grown up, he will be what his father has not been, a good king. At five years of age he is already very popular, and when he travels with his mother on those dear Bohemian railways that crawl like four-wheelers, and when he sees from the window of the saloon-carriage a gate-keeper carrying a baby on one arm and presenting his little flag with the other, the royal child, to whom his mother has made a sign, always throws him a kiss.
MADEMOISELLE PERLE
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
I
What a strange notion indeed of mine to choose Mademoiselle Perle for queen this evening.
Every year I go to my old friend Chantal’s for Twelfth-night. My father, whose most intimate friend he was, used to take me there when a child. I have kept up the custom, and no doubt will continue to keep it up as long as I live, and as long as there is a Chantal in this world.
The Chantals, I ought to say, lead a singular existence: they live at Paris as if they were at Grasse, Yvetot, or Pont-à-Mousson.
They have a house with a small garden near the Observatory. There they live their own life as if they were in the country. Of Paris, the real Paris, they have no knowledge and no suspicion: they are so far, far away from it! Sometimes, however, they take a journey, a long journey, there. Madame Chantal goes to lay in supplies, as they say in the family. This is how they lay in supplies.
Mademoiselle Perle, who keeps the keys of the pantry-presses (for the linen-presses are administered by the mistress of the house herself), Mademoiselle Perle notices that the sugar is running down, that the preserves are exhausted, that there is not much more left at the bottom of the coffee-sack.