Madame de Gimbecque, though thus egoistical in her calculations, was nevertheless a light-hearted, good-humoured little woman, who, if she did not go out of her way to do good, did all the good that lay in it. She had been born, bred, married, and widowed according to that matter-of-fact social system of the French which leaves no space for the expansion of the feelings. Nothing like affection had graced her parents' household,—nothing like affection had warmed her own. Her fifteen thousand francs per annum had been married to those of an ex-colonel of cuirassiers, thirty years her senior, who had pretty nearly scolded, sworn, smoked, and expectorated his pretty wife out of patience, when the sour little cherub who sits up aloft keeping watch over matrimonial destinies, took pity on the lady, and took the colonel to itself.
Marianne de Gimbecque, (then not between fifty and five-and-twenty, but between five-and-twenty and fifteen,) though an orphan as well as a widow, consoled herself as thoroughly as propriety would admit for this sudden bereavement. She had neither a tie nor a relative in the world; but what pretty Parisian with trente mille francs de rente can feel lonely, while there is an opera, a carnival, and a milliner's shop in existence!
The baroness speedily set about improving her solitary hours. She devoted herself to the cultivation of her charms, as an Englishwoman might have done to the cultivation of her mind. Her accomplishments as a cosmetician were really surprising; she studied the art as a branch of natural history; not a perfumer in Paris could have deceived her as to the ingredients of a wash, or chemical compounds of a pommade. She knew what acids would injure the enamel of her teeth, what astringents wither the smooth surface of her cheek, what spirituous infusions turn her sable locks to iron-grey or silver, as well as Berthollet or "Sromfridevé." She could tell what atmospheric changes enabled her to exchange blue ribbons for pink, without compromise of the becoming; and regulated by the phases of the moon her ebbs and flows between cap, hat, and turban.
Nothing could be more artistically managed than the apartment of the little coquette. Nothing, by the way, is so easy to render coquettish as an entresol, which is, in fact, a series of boudoirs: saloons like those of Devonshire House, or a hall like that of Stafford, must be stately and ostentatious; the trickery of prettiness would be as much out of place in such places as rouge and pearl powder on the marble cheek of Michael Angelo's Moses. But a light airy entresol, or mezzonino story, whose windows, fronting the south, are shaded by Genoese awnings, overhanging balconies, filled with geraniums, heliotropes, and mignonette,—whose anteroom is painted blue stripewise, to represent a tent, and whose dining-room is varnished scagliola fashion,—whose drawing-room is of white and gold, the fauteuils and divans of yellow satin, the cabarets of pale Saxon blue porcelain, adorned with shepherds, shepherdesses, and garlands of carnations,—the consoles of varnished maple, white as snow, or as the single marble table, taillé en bloc, which sustains a scentless exotic in a vase of pale-green Sèvres,—whose boudoir is a tent of white muslin, drawn over dove-coloured gros de Naples,—whose bed-room is hung with cachemere spotted with palm-leaves, leading to a bath-room altogether spotless, and lined with mirrors;—such an entresol is a paradise for a Peri, (whose age is between twenty-five and fifty!) and such was the one inhabited in the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre by Madame la Baronne de Gimbecque!
The household was concomitant. A page in a neat livery, a powdered-headed middle-aged sobriety of a maître d'hôtel, a chef of sufficient merit for a lady neither a dinner-giver nor dinner-devotee; and, to complete the measure, the soubrette, the waiting-maid, the spruce, cunning, pimpante, fringante, Mademoiselle Aglaé, with her embroidered cambric aprons and pink ribbons;—one pennyworth of waiting-maid to all this monstrous quantity of male-faction! The maître d'hôtel dusted the china, the page rubbed the floors,—everything but the lady's toilet being performed in France by slaves of the masculine gender. Monsieur Simon, the sober maître d'hôtel, and Lindor, the pert page, sometimes suggested to their mistress's mistress that an additional petticoat would be far more advantageous to the establishment than entertaining a workwoman fifteen days in the month for the care of the household linen; but the femme de chambre would not hear of it. She chose to be the sole Helen in Troy; and, though devoid of personal views on either page or butler,—the cook in his white paper casquette, or the coachman in his flaxen wig,—resolved to admit no rival near the throne of her soubrettish autocracy. It was quite plague enough to have the house frequented by Eugène de Marsan, (the handsome cousin-german of the ugly defunct ex-colonel of cuirassiers, Monsieur le Baron Nicodême de Gimbecque,) and Claude de Bercy, (the popular author of seventy-five successful vaudevilles,) without encumbering the little entresol (or its double entrance, double staircase, and corridor, appropriately named in Paris "of escape,") with such lumber as a chambermaid.
"Has Madame Oudot sent home my foulard peignoir?" demanded Madame la Baronne of her waiting-maid, as she lay reclining in her marble-bath, whose tepid warmth served to diffuse through the little room the aroma of the eau de Ninon which Mademoiselle Aglaé was sprinkling on the surface.
"Non, madame! Yet I was particular in making her promise it for yesterday, knowing that Madame expected a visit from Monsieur Eugène before she dressed to take her ride."
"Tiresome woman!" cried the lady in the bath,—an apostrophe which Aglaé of course applied to the unpunctual couturière. "Give me the new number of 'Le Bon Ton,' and in five minutes ring for my chocolate, and bring in my warm linen,—not sooner, or it will be cold before I am ready."
The waiting-maid obeyed; but finding on the marble slab in the corridor the Constitutionnel, damp from the press, she held it for a moment over the drying-basket of the bath-linen, and returned to her lady, taking the liberty, as she slowly paced the room, to cast an eye upon the news of the morning.