We hear speak of the world, in the Infirmary, only at the two public collections and a little on Sundays: on those days, our hospice changes into a kind of parish-church. The Sister Superior pretends that beautiful ladies come to Mass in the hope of seeing me; skilful manager that she is, she lays their curiosity under contribution: by promising to show me to them, she attracts them to the laboratory; once she has entrapped them, she forces sweet-stuff on them, willy-nilly, in exchange for money. She makes me serve at the sale of the chocolate manufactured for the profit of her patients, even as La Martinière took me into partnership for the trade in the gooseberry-syrup which he used to quaff to the success of his love-affairs[502]. The sainted woman also steals stumps of quills from Madame de Chateaubriand's ink-stand; she trades in them among the thorough-bred Royalists, declaring that with those precious stumps were written the "superb Mémoire sur la captivité de madame la duchesse de Berry."
A few good pictures of the Spanish and Italian Schools, a Virgin by Guérin, the St. Theresa, the last master-piece of the painter of Corinne[503], make us attached to the arts. As for history, we shall soon have at the hospice a sister of the Marquis de Favras and a daughter of Madame Roland: the Monarchy and the Republic have set me to expiate their ingratitude and to feed their invalids.
All are anxious to be received at Marie-Thérèse. The poor women who are obliged to leave when they have recovered their health take up their lodgings near the Infirmary, in the hope of falling ill again and returning to it. Nothing smacks of the hospital: the Jewess, the Protestant, the Catholic, the foreigner, the Frenchwoman receive the cares of a delicate charity disguising itself as an affectionate relationship; each afflicted woman seems to have found her mother. I have seen a Spaniard, beautiful as Dorothea the "Pearl of Seville," die at sixteen of consumption, in the common dormitory, congratulating herself upon her happiness, looking as she smiled, with great, black, half-dimmed eyes, a pale and emaciated face, at Madame la Dauphine, who asked after her and assured her that she would soon be well. She expired that same evening, far from the Mosque of Cordova and the banks of the Guadalquivir, her native stream:
"'What are you?'
"'A Spaniard.'
"'A Spaniard and here[504]!'"
*
We have many widows of knights of the Holy Ghost among our frequenters; they bring with them the only thing that remains to them, the portraits of their husbands in the uniform of a captain of foot: a white coat with rose-pink or sky-blue facings, with their hair dressed à l'oiseau royal. They are put in the lumber-room. I cannot look at the regiment of them without laughing: if the Old Monarchy had survived, I should to-day be adding to the number of those portraits, I should be acting as the solace of my grand-nephews in some deserted gallery:
"That's your great-uncle François, the captain in the Navarre Regiment: he was a very witty man! He wrote the riddle in the Mercure beginning with the words, 'Cut off my head,' and the fugitive poem, in the Almanach des Muses, called the Cri du cœur."