THE THREE ROSES.
I.
It was at precisely half-past ten, as he satisfied himself by looking at his watch, on the morning of the 17th of June, in the year 1743, that a young gentleman got up from a chair in front of the Café Procope (just then opening with that air of stretching itself, rubbing its eyes, and yawning which marks a café in the ante-meridian hours). He stood for a moment twirling his cane and his moustache alternately, and then, as if suddenly reminded by the look of the café of a great moral duty omitted, stretched himself slightly and yawned prodigiously. It was, to be sure, rather early in the day to begin yawning, except for cafés; but then this young chronologer had his own way of dividing time, and, believing with the poet that the best of all ways to lengthen our days is to snatch a few hours from the night, what was early in the morning for most men was only somewhat late at night for him. It is to be noted, too, since the most trifling incidents in the life of a hero are worthy of record, that he yawned with such admirable self-possession, with such a mingling of good-will and graceful languor; he had so much the air of giving his whole mind to it, and at the same time of being so used to yawning that he really didn’t care so much for it after all, that you saw at once he was a man of distinction, to whom a yawn was not, as to most of us, a rare luxury, but a daily, nay, an hourly, a half-hourly, necessary of life.
Much might here be said, if space permitted, of a highly instructive nature, on the philosophy of yawning and its many varieties: the go-to-bed yawn; the get-up yawn; the tired yawn, the yawn of simple lassitude; the good-humored yawn, which takes itself as an excellent joke; the peevish yawn, which denies itself acridly as if it were a crime; the writer’s yawn and the reader’s yawn (quod Jupiter omen avertat!); the chronic yawn and the fixed yawn which merges into the drawl; the imitative yawn, into which unwary grandmothers are seduced by wicked little boys with slowly-flapping palm; the bored yawn, which is a protest against the world in general; the well-bred yawn, which is a protest against the immediate company, and is practised only in solitude. (It is, of course, the last-named sort in which our hero indulges.) There is a great deal of character, too, in a yawn, from your timid little lady’s yawn, shrinking away and hiding behind fan or handkerchief, or with hypocritical feminine art so moulding itself that, like Lucy Fountain’s, “it glides into society a smile,” to your open, hearty, man’s yawn, showing all its grinders shamelessly, as if it were a fine natural prospect one ought to be grateful for. Napoleon judged men, as he led them, by their noses;[[166]] a true philosopher would classify them by their yawns.
Meantime, however, we are leaving our hero yawning at the risk of dislocating his jaw and of setting the reader to keep him company. Let us, therefore, resume. Having indulged himself sufficiently in this refreshment, and recomposed his features again with some care, the young gentleman stood for a moment irresolute, tapping his boot with his cane, and then, as if his mind were made up, set off at a brisk pace in the direction of Notre Dame. As he stepped out it did not need his showy uniform, which was that of the famous corps of Mousquetaires, his jingling spurs, or his long rapier, of a heavier make than the dress-sword then worn by every gentleman, to show him for a soldier. You saw it in his measured stride, in every movement of a lithe and graceful yet strong and well-knit figure, in the gay recklessness of his manner, and especially in the ardent and somewhat imperious glance of his dark gray eye. A trace of superciliousness and vanity on his bold, handsome face you would have pardoned to his years and comeliness. Women smiled kindly on the gay young mousquetaire as he passed them, and were not ill-pleased at the kisses he flung them in promiscuous homage from the tips of his gloved fingers. Male glances not so kind, instinct, indeed, with smouldering scorn and hatred, were shot at him covertly too—glances such as a half-century later gloated openly with savage ferocity over the death-struggles of other hapless young mousquetaires dying hopelessly and gallantly, sword in hand, for a king who knew how to make locks but not laws, and a queen who could win all hearts but those of her people.
But right little recked our young mousquetaire of glances, hostile or kindly, from those he looked upon but as a rabble of the gutter, to be kicked or beaten like other animals out of his lordly path. The young summer in his blood all unconscious of that slumbering storm, he strode along, dispensing musk and kisses, and gaily humming a madrigal of Benserade, to the Rue des Poulies, and along that street, picking his way daintily over the wretched pavement till he came in front of a certain bric-à-brac shop. There he paused, hesitated a moment, and, pulling off his plumed hat and putting on his most fascinating smile, bowed low to two persons standing in the doorway.
This simple act of courtesy had a singular effect on the two persons in question, a young man and a young woman. This effect was apparently the same on both: they first colored violently, then frowned, then turned pale. But to an observer in the attic window over the way it seemed that the internal emotions indicated by these facial changes were very unlike in each. The young man seemed—to this observer—to be moved by displeasure rising even to intense rage; the girl’s uppermost feeling seemed to be embarrassment, and displeasure, if any, only at being caused embarrassment. But the observer could not quite decide that she was displeased at all by this act of politeness, and he inclined rather to think that her blush was caused by pleasure at seeing the young mousquetaire, while her frown was directed at her companion for his inopportune presence.
“Yes, that is it,” said this acute analyst to himself: “the blush was for the mousquetaire, whom she is glad to see, the frown for M. De Trop, who is in the way, and the pallor for herself, whom she heartily wishes out of the way in the row she foresees coming.”
While this thoughtful philosopher of the attic was thus moralizing a curious incident took place. The girl, who held some roses in her hand, dropped one of them, no doubt from agitation. The mousquetaire sprang forward to seize it. As he stooped over the flower the young man of the doorway, with an angry exclamation, thrust him back with such good-will that he reeled into the roadway and came near falling. Recovering himself in an instant, he whipped out his sword and rushed upon the other, crying:
“Baseborn scullion! darest thou raise thy hand to a gentleman? Thy life shall pay it.”