"She knows an infinite variety of things, and has had all kinds of masters," sighed Lætitia: "she speaks all the languages in Europe. I believe Americans have a peculiar facility for pronunciation, like the Russians, and she learned at her school in America philosophy, rhetoric, logic, Latin, algebra, chemistry."
"I wonder she should be so sweet a woman," said my father. "She seems a good girl—I never took her for a learned one—but her mother is a fool, and I should think her father must be that or worse. I wonder what he can be like? It seems to an Englishman so strange that a man should stay at home alone for years, and suffer his wife and family to travel all over the Continent without protection."
Though my father, mother and sisters declined the Sunday invitation of Mrs. Leare, I went to her reception. The guests were nearly all Italians, Poles, Spaniards or Frenchmen. There was no Englishman present, but myself, and only one or two Americans. I felt at once how out of place my mother, the country matron, and my father, ce respectable viellard, would have been in such a circle. But Mrs. Leare's guests were not the jeunesse dorée nor the dubious nobility I had expected to meet in her salon. The Frenchmen among them were all men whose names were familiar in French political circles—men of revolutionary tendencies and of advanced opinions. I afterward discovered they had taken advantage of Mrs. Leare's desire to be the head of a salon to use her rooms as a convenient rendezvous. It was safe ground on which to simmer their revolutionary cauldron. It was seething and bubbling that night, although neither the Leares nor myself were aware of what was brewing. The talk was all about the Banquets, especially the impending reform banquet in the Rue Chaillot. The gentlemen present were not exactly conspirators: they were for the most part political reformers, who, being cut off from the usual modes of expressing themselves through a recognized parliamentary opposition or by the medium of petition, had devised a system of political banquets, some fifty of which had already been held in the departments, and they were now engaged in getting one up in Paris in the Twelfth arrondissement.
At that time, in a population of thirty-five millions, there were but a quarter of a million of French voters, and as in France all places (from that of a railroad guard to a seat on the bench) were disposed of by the government, it was very easy for ministers to control the legislature. A reform, really needed in the franchise, was the object proposed to themselves by the original heads of the Revolution of 1848, though when they had set their ball in motion they could neither control it nor keep up with it as it rolled downward.
The prevalent idea in Mrs. Leare's salon was that the banquet of the Rue Chaillot would go off quietly, that the prefect of police would protest, and that the affair would then pass into the law-courts, where it would remain until all interest in the subject had passed away. One was sensible, however, that there was a general feeling of excitement in the atmosphere. Paris swarmed with troops, evidently under stricter discipline than usual. People looked into each other's faces interrogatively and read the daily papers with an anxious air.
Though I did not at the time fully appreciate what I saw, I was struck by the business-like character of the men about me. The guests, I thought, took very little notice of the lady of the house. I did not then suspect that they were using her hospitality for their own purposes, and that they felt secure in her total incapacity to understand what they were doing. She, meantime, intent on filling her reception-rooms with celebrities and titled persons, was charmed to have collected so many distinguished men around her.
Hermione appeared bewildered, uncomfortable and restless, like a spectator on the edge of a great crowd. "There are too many strangers here to-night," she said: "mamma and I do not know one half of them. They have been brought here by their friends. To have a salon is mamma's ambition, but this is not my idea of it. I feel as if we were out of place among these men, who talk to each other and hardly notice us at all."
We sat together and exchanged our thoughts in whispers. It was one of those crowds that create a solitude for lovers. Not that we talked sentiment or that we were lovers. We conversed about the excitements of the day—of the Leste affair, in which the king and the king's ministry were accused of protecting dishonesty; of the Beauvallon and D'Equivilley duel and the Praslin murder, in connection with both of which the royal family and the ministry were popularly accused of protecting criminals—and at last the conversation strayed away from France to Hermione's own girlhood. She told me of her happy country home in Maryland with her grandmother, and sighed. I asked her if she was going to the English ball to be given on Wednesday night at the beautiful Jardin d'Hiver in the Champs Élysées.
"I suppose so," she replied, "but I don't care for large assemblies: I feel afraid of the men I meet. I wish your mother could chaperon me: it would be much nicer to be with her than with my own. Mamma understands nothing about looking after me; she wants to have a good time herself, and I am only in her way. Do you know, Mr. Farquhar, I have a theory that when women have missed anything they ought to have enjoyed in early life, they always want to go back and pick it up. Mamma had no pleasures in her youth, no attentions, no gayety. If I am to be chaperoned, I like the real thing. If I were at home in Maryland, where my father came from, I should need no one to protect me: you could take me to the ball."
"I, Miss Hermione?"