“Don’t know where he lives?” cries Marcel indignantly. “Perhaps you will tell me next I don’t know where the Hôtel Carnavalet is, or how to find the Rue Culture Ste. Catherine? Don’t know where he lives, indeed!” And Marcel flings out of the room in a state of high dudgeon that his acquaintance with a great man should be doubted, and, worst of all, by Nanette. We are sorry to say he slammed the door after him. The best of brothers will do such things under strong provocation. But Nanette only smiled—the wily Nanette!
III.
The next morning, at his frugal breakfast in a rather lofty apartment of the Hôtel Carnavalet, the Prince de Courtenaye read with much amazement the following letter:
“My Dear Cousin: I am an old woman and your near relation. I have long observed with pain the poverty which keeps you from assuming your proper station. I have wealth, and not many years to keep it. What is a burden to me will be a help to you. Suffer me, then, from my superfluity to relieve your necessity—I claim it as the twofold privilege of age and love—and accept as frankly as I tender it the 25,000 francs which I enclose to procure you an establishment suited to your rank. On the first of every month 4,000 francs will be forwarded to you in addition.”
Some commonplaces of civility ended this remarkable but not unpleasant epistle—would that such a one some celestial postman might leave at the door of the present writer, to whom documents of a far different nature—but this is a painful and unnecessary digression. Let us continue. The prince read the queer communication with conflicting emotions, in which wonder predominated. He was not aware of any wealthy aunt or female relative particularly prone to this sort of furtive benevolence; but his connections were legion, and women were odd fish. Still, his honor seemed to him to forbid his accepting a fortune so acquired. But older and wiser heads stifled, or at least silenced, his scruples; and secretly resolving to leave no stone unturned to discover his mysterious benefactress, and to return to her or to her heirs every sou of the money, which in his heart he accepted only as a loan, he resigned himself to his good-luck with tolerable cheerfulness. Henceforth no more elegant equipage was to be seen than the Prince de Courtenaye’s. He became the fashion; he was the life and talk of every salon—as we should say, the success of the season. Nevertheless, he failed not to go every afternoon to the garden of the Palais Royal for his nosegay, with this difference only: that he now paid francs instead of sous.
A year sped away, spent by the prince in buying nosegays and in sharing the gayeties, though not the dissipations, of the court; by Nanette in continuing to perfect herself secretly in all the feminine accomplishments of her time, so that now, at the age of nineteen, she was not only peerless in beauty, but as cultivated as Mme. de Sévigné and as learned as Mme. Dacier—no, not as Mme. Dacier—no mere mortal was ever so learned as Mme. Dacier; but let us say as Mme. de La Fayette, who could set Father Rapin right in his Latin and silence Ménage. Was it for herself she underwent these prodigious labors? It is not known that she ever mentioned. But she still sold nosegays and still reaped a golden harvest.
One evening the Count de la Châtre was again sitting beside her when the Marquis de Louvois once more accosted him.
“My dear fellow,” said he, “what the mischief ails Pierre?” (he spoke of De Courtenaye). “He must be going mad. Have you heard his latest freak? Mlle. de Craon, one of our wealthiest heiresses, with a royal dowry and a princely income, is proposed to him, and what do you think? He refuses her—positively refuses. What bee is in his bonnet?”
“Love.”
“Love! Is it one of the Royal Princesses, then?”