“I can't understand how you can laugh at it. If I were in your place, I should have died of vexation and wounded pride long ago,” said Mme. de Chanoir, one day, as Aline related in high glee an obus episode that she had had that morning; “but I really believe you have no feeling.”
“Well, whatever I have, I keep out of the reach of vulgar impertinence. I should be very sorry to make my feelings a target for insolence and bad breeding,” replied Aline pertly. This was the simple truth. Her feelings were out of the reach of such petty shafts; they were cased in cheerfulness and common sense, and a nobler sort of pride than that in which Mme. de Chanoir considered her sister wanting. If, however, the obus was frequently fatal to Mlle. de Lemaque's social standing, on the other hand it occasionally did her good service; but of this later. Its present character was that of an explosive bomb which she carried in her pocket, and lancéd with infinite gusto on every available opportunity.
On Saturday evening the sisters were “at home.” These little soirées were the great event of their quiet lives. All the episodes and anecdotes of the week were treasured up for [pg 065] that evening, when the intimes came to see them and converse and sip a glass of cold eau sucrée in summer, and a cup of hot ditto in winter (but then it was called tea) by the light of a small lamp with a green shade. There was no attempt at entertainment or finery of any kind, except that Mme. Cléry, instead of going home as soon as the dinner things were washed up, stayed to open the door. It was a remnant of the sort of society that used to exist in French families some thirty years ago, when conversation was cultivated as the primary accomplishment of men and women, and when they met regularly to exercise themselves in the difficult and delightful art. It was not reserved to the well-born exclusively to talk well and brilliantly in those days, when the most coveted encomium that could be passed on any one was, “He talks well.” All classes vied for it; every circle had its centre of conversation. The fauteuil de l'aïeule and the salon of the femme d'esprit, each had its audience, attended as assiduously, and perhaps enjoyed quite as much, as the vaudevilles and ambigus that have since drawn away the bourgeois from the one and the man of fashion from the other. Besides its usual habitués for conversation, every circle had one habitué who was looked upon as the friend of the family, and tacitly took precedence of all the others. The friend of the family at No. 13 was a certain professor of the Sorbonne named M. Dalibouze. He was somewhere on the sunny side of fifty, a bald, pompous little man who wore spectacles, took snuff, and laid down the law; very prosy and very estimable, a model professor. He had never married, but it was the dream of his life to marry. He had meditated on marriage for the last thirty years, and of course knew more about it than any man who had been married double that time. He was never so eloquent or so emphatic as when dilating on the joys and duties of domestic life; no matter how tired he was with study and scientific researches, how disappointed in the result of some cherished literary scheme, he brightened up the moment marriage came on the tapis. This hobby of the professor's was a great amusement to Mme. de Chanoir, who delighted to see him jump into the saddle and ride off at a canter while she lay languidly working at her tapestry, patting him on the back every now and then, by a word of encouragement, or signifying her assent merely by a smile or a nod. Sometimes she would take him to task seriously about putting his theories into practice and getting himself a wife, assuring him that it was quite wicked of him not to marry when he was so richly endowed with all the qualities necessary to make a model husband.
“Ah! madame, if I thought I were capable of making a young woman happy!” M. Dalibouze would exclaim with a sigh; “but at my age! No, I have let my chance go by.”
“How, sir, at your age!” the générale would protest. “Why, it is the very flower of manhood, the moment of all others for a man to marry. You have outlived the delusions of youth and none of its vigor; you have crossed the Rubicon that separates folly from wisdom, and you have left nothing on the other side of the bridge but the silly chimera of boyhood. Believe me, the woman whom you would select would never wish to see you a day younger.”
And M. Dalibouze would caress his chin, and observe thoughtfully: “Do you think so, madame?” Upon [pg 066] which Mme. de Chanoir would pour another vial of oil and honey on the learned head of the professor, till the wonder was that it did not turn on his shoulders.
Aline had no sympathy with his rhapsodies or his jeremiads; they bored her to extinction, and sometimes it was all she could do not to tell him so; but she disapproved of his being made a joke of, and testified against it very decidedly when Félicité, in a spirit of mischief, led him up to a more than usually ridiculous culmination. It was not fair, she said, to make a greater fool of the good little man than he made of himself, and instead of encouraging him to talk such nonsense one ought to laugh him out of it, and try and cure him of his silly conceit.
“I don't see it at all in that light,” Mme. de Chanoir would answer. “In the first place, if I laughed at him, or rather if I let him see that I did, he would never forgive me, and, as I have a great regard for him, I should be sorry to lose his friendship; and in the next place, it's a great amusement to me to see him swallow my little doses of flattery so complacently, and I have no scruple in dosing him, because nothing that I or any one else could say could possibly add one grain to his self-conceit, so one may as well turn it to account for a little entertainment.”
It was partly this system of flattery, which Aline resented on principle, that induced her occasionally to snub the professor, and partly the fact that she had reason to suspect his dreams of married bliss centred upon herself. In fact, she knew it. He had never told her so outright, for the simple reason that, whenever he drew near that crisis, Aline cut him short in such a peremptory manner that it cowed him for weeks, but nevertheless she knew in her heart of hearts that she reigned supreme over M. Dalibouze's. She would not have married him, no, not if he could have crowned her queen of the Sorbonne and the Collége de France, but the fact of his being her slave and aspiring to be her master constituted a claim on her regard which a true-hearted woman seldom disowns.
Félicité would have favored his suit if there had been the ghost of a chance for him, but she knew there was not.