"Sacristie! ce cher Monsieur Boncœur! another audience of the king!" exclaimed Mademoiselle Aglaé, presenting the paper to her lady, who extended to receive it, a languid hand, humid with the perfumed exhalations of the bath.
"Doubtless about his title," she replied.
"Title!" inquired the waiting-maid, fearing she might be about to forfeit the envied distinction of belonging to the only household of quality in the hotel.
"Didn't I tell you that our neighbour overhead had purchased the estate of D'Offémont, and was trying to obtain the royal sanction to assume the name? Ay, exactly: the King, I perceive, has created him a baron; not D'Offémont, however,—he is to be Baron de Boncœur. What people this government does ennoble!"
"Monsieur Boncœur has one of the greatest names in the monied world," remonstrated the waiting-woman: "he is mayor of his arrondissement, and marguiller of the parish."
"He may be beadle or drum-major, for anything I know or care," said Madame de Gimbecque with sublime contempt; "but I am convinced that in the time of the elder branch he would never have shaken the dust from his feet in the palace of the Tuileries. Ha!—a critique on Claude's new play. Pray remind me, by and by, to send to Monsieur de Bercy the note-case wadded with vitiver I have been embroidering for him. Voyons! 'Sophie de Melcour, a drama in three acts. We regret—a-hem!—feeble—diffuse—flat—a-hem!—dialogue full of platitudes—characters full of exaggeration—style stilted—catastrophe contemptible—false taste—corrupt morality.' (This must have been written by some particular friend!) 'We cannot take our leave of Monsieur de Bercy without counselling him to turn his mind to some other branch of literary occupation than the stage, for which the bent of his genius evidently disqualifies this pains-taking but ill-judging young man.' Bah!—Eugène de Marsan's doing, I am convinced! He knows I dote upon theatrical entertainments; he knows that I bespoke half-a-dozen boxes to give éclat to Monsieur de Bercy's piece, and thinks to disgust me by this disparagement. Eugène does not know me; he does not appreciate the generosity of woman's nature! His abuse of poor Claude's play has put me more in conceit with it than ever. Certainly the style of 'Sophie de Melcour' is rather stilted, and nobody can deny the exaggeration of the characters. I expected that the catastrophe would cause the damnation of the piece; and as to the dialogue, I could scarcely sit it out without a yawn. Aglaé! on second thoughts, Monsieur de Marsan is going out of town, and has been plaguing me for the last six months for some little trifle of my own work. I will give him the vitiver pocket-book: there will be plenty of time hereafter to get up another for Monsieur de Bercy. People so devoted to letters have no time to think of embroidered pocket-books. I dare say Bercy would like one bought at the Petit Dunquerque twice as well. There is no more sentiment in him than in one of his own farces."
Mademoiselle Aglaé was of the same opinion. The Constitutionnel having decided that Claude's seventy-sixth vaudeville was not to run, she decided that the author of the vaudeville was also at a stand-still. The loss of his droits d'auteur, which would probably deprive her of the gold chain and cross promised by her lady's love, determined his forfeiture of the embroidered note-case!
While the sacred mysteries of the toilet are proceeding in the bath-room, let us take a peep at the equivocal gentleman of the third-floor; no longer arrayed in velvet or sparkling with solitaires, but engirt in a scanty, washed-out printed calico dressing-gown, torn in the button-holes, and short enough to display at the open wristbands the sleeves of a dirty checked shirt, covering a yellow shrivelled skin, apparently washed out, like the calico. A pair of flannel drawers, yellow as arnotto, covered his shrunk shanks; a pair of old shoes, cut down into agonizing slippers, his stockingless feet; while, enfranchised from the spruce, lustrous toupet adorning his brows when exposed to day's or gas-light's garish eye, his mean, narrow, Emperor-of-Austrian forehead recedes into a bare crown, whose denuded ugliness adds thirty years to the age of the full-dressed sallier-forth of the night before. Even his mouth—that critical verifier of age—is strangely oldened; for his set of Desirabodes is still freshening in a glass of water on the chimney-piece, while the mumbling, toothless gums, fallen on each other, allow the lanky sallow cheeks to collapse, like the sides of a half-empty balloon.
Such was the unsophisticated man of the individual whose "getting-up" (as Claude de Bercy would have called it) for public representation was one of the miracles of the Palais Royal; a bazaar which, like the pedlar from the fair Lavinian shore, hath "complexions in its pack," and youth and beauty per yard, per ell, or per ounce, exposed in all its plate-glass windows. It was, as we have already stated, usually half-past seven of an evening when the full-dressed effort of art started forth along the Boulevards; it was as invariably three o'clock in the morning, minus a quarter, when it returned again to lay aside its adornments, and subside into the lean and slippered pantaloon. Ma'mselle Berthe had been three hours snoring when, with a patent key, he nightly let himself in, to deposit his Desirabodes, false fronts, whiskers, and calves on his dressing-table; and in the secretaire beside it realities of a more solid nature: bags of silver pieces, rouleaux of golden ones, and now and then a flimsy I O U from some English flat, or an I O U addressed by the Bank of England to millions of English flats, which he rarely ensnugged within the secret-paper-drawer of his bonheur du jour without pronouncing a benediction over its senseless form, varying in intensity of expression, indeed, according as the document happened to be accompanied by bags of silver or rouleaux of gold. When wholly unaccompanied,—sole trophy of his midnight gains,—the fiendish expression of the little mummy's puckered visage deepened into downright demonism.