“That’s true,” replied Bigourdin, with a capacious smile, showing white strong teeth.
“They are the first people—French or English, I shall have met who know my father.”
“That’s true also,” said Bigourdin. “And they must be droll types like your excellent father himself. Tiens, let me see again what he says about them.” He searched his pockets, a process involving convulsions of his frame which made the rocking-chair creak. “It must be in my black jacket,” said he at last.
“I’ll get it,” said Félise, and went into the house.
Bigourdin rolled and lit a cigarette and gave himself up to comfortable reflection. The Hôtel des Grottes was built on the slope of a rock and the loggia or verandah on which Bigourdin was taking his ease, hung over a miniature precipice. At the bottom ran the River Dronne encircling most of the old-world town and crossed here and there by flashing little bridges. Away to the northeast loomed the mountains of the Limousin where the river has its source. The tiny place slumbered in the slanting sunshine. The sight of Brantôme stretched out below him was inseparable from Bigourdin’s earliest conception of the universe. In the Hôtel des Grottes he had been born; there, save for a few years at Lyons whither he had been sent by his mother in order to widen his views on hotel keeping, he had spent all his life, and there he sincerely hoped to die full of honour and good nourishment. Brantôme contented him. It belonged to him. It was so diminutive and compact that he could take the whole of it in at once. He was familiar with all the little tragedies and comedies that enacted themselves beneath those red-tiled roofs. Did he walk down the Rue de Périgueux his hand went to his hat as often as that of the President of the Republic on his way to a review at Longchamps. He was a man of substance and consideration, and he was just forty years of age. And Félise adored him, and anticipated his commands.
She returned with the letter. He glanced through it, reading portions aloud:
“I am sending you a young couple whom I have taken to my heart. They are not relations, they are not married and they are not lovers. They are Arcadians of the pavement, more innocent than doves, and of a ferocious English morality. She is a painter without patrons, he a professor without classes. They are also candidates for happiness performing their novitiate. Later they will take the vows.”
“What does he mean? What vows?”
“Perhaps they are pious people and are going to enter the convent,” Félise suggested.
“I can see your father—anti-clerical that he is—interesting himself in little nuns and monks.”