“I would love it well,” replies Florac, “but I am here in faction. My cousin and seigneur M. le Duc d’Ivry is coming all the way from Bagneres de Bigorre. He says he counts on me:—affaires mon cher, affaires d’etat.”
“How pleased the duchess will be! Easy with that bag!” shouts Clive. “How pleased the princess will be!” In truth he hardly knew what he was saying.
“Vous croyez; vous croyez,” says M. de Florac. “As you have a fourth place, I know who had best take it.”
“And who is that?” asked the young traveller.
Lord Kew and Barnes, Esq., of Newcome, came out of the Hotel de Hollande at this moment. Barnes slunk back, seeing Jack Belsize’s hairy face. Kew ran over the bridge. “Good-bye, Clive. Good-bye, Jack.” “Good-bye, Kew.” It was a great handshake. Away goes the postillion blowing his horn, and young Hannibal has left Capua behind him.
CHAPTER XXXI.
Madame la Duchesse
In one of Clive Newcome’s letters from Baden, the young man described to me, with considerable humour and numerous illustrations as his wont was, a great lady to whom he was presented at that watering-place by his friend Lord Kew. Lord Kew had travelled in the East with Monsieur le Duc and Madame la Duchesse d’Ivry—the prince being an old friend of his lordship’s family. He is the “Q” of Madame d’Ivry’s book of travels, Footprints of the Gazelles, by a daughter of the Crusaders, in which she prays so fervently for Lord Kew’s conversion. He is the “Q” who rescued the princess from the Arabs, and performed many a feat which lives in her glowing pages. He persists in saying that he never rescued Madame la Princesse from any Arabs at all, except from one beggar who was bawling out for bucksheesh, and whom Kew drove away with a stick. They made pilgrimages to all the holy places, and a piteous sight it was, said Lord Kew, to see the old prince in the Jerusalem processions at Easter pacing with bare feet and a candle. Here Lord Kew separated from the prince’s party. His name does not occur in the last part of the Footprints; which, in truth, are filled full of strange rhapsodies, adventures which nobody was but the princess, and mystic disquisitions. She hesitates at nothing, like other poets of her nation: not profoundly learned, she invents where she has not acquired: mingles together religion and the opera; and performs Parisian pas-de-ballet before the gates of monasteries and the cells of anchorites. She describes, as if she had herself witnessed the catastrophe, the passage of the Red Sea: and, as if there were no doubt of the transaction, an unhappy love-affair between Pharaoh’s eldest son and Moses’s daughter. At Cairo, à propos of Joseph’s granaries, she enters into a furious tirade against Putiphar, whom she paints as an old savage, suspicious and a tyrant. They generally have a copy of the Footprints of the Gazelles at the Circulating Library at Baden, as Madame d’Ivry constantly visits that watering-place. M. le Duc was not pleased with the book, which was published entirely without his concurrence, and which he described as one of the ten thousand follies of Madame la Duchesse.
This nobleman was five-and-forty years older than his duchess. France is the country where that sweet Christian institution of mariages de convenance (which so many folks of the family about which this story treats are engaged in arranging) is most in vogue. There the newspapers daily announce that M. de Foy has a bureau de confiance, where families may arrange marriages for their sons and daughters in perfect comfort and security. It is but a question of money on one side and the other. Mademoiselle has so many francs of dot; Monsieur has such and such rentes or lands in possession or reversion, an étude d’avoué, a shop with a certain clientèle bringing him such and such an income, which may be doubled by the judicious addition of so much capital, and the pretty little matrimonial arrangement is concluded (the agent touching his percentage), or broken off, and nobody unhappy, and the world none the wiser. The consequences of the system I do not pretend personally to know; but if the light literature of a country is a reflex of its manners, and French novels are a picture of French life, a pretty society must that be into the midst of which the London reader may walk in twelve hours from this time of perusal, and from which only twenty miles of sea separate us.
When the old Duke d’Ivry, of the ancient ancient nobility of France, an emigrant with Artois, a warrior with Conde, an exile during the reign of the Corsican usurper, a grand prince, a great nobleman afterwards, though shorn of nineteen-twentieths of his wealth by the Revolution,—when the Duke d’Ivry lost his two sons, and his son’s son likewise died, as if fate had determined to end the direct line of that noble house, which had furnished queens to Europe, and renowned chiefs to the Crusaders—being of an intrepid spirit, the Duke was ill disposed to yield to his redoubtable enemy, in spite of the cruel blows which the latter had inflicted upon him, and when he was more than sixty years of age, three months before the July Revolution broke out, a young lady of a sufficient nobility, a virgin of sixteen, was brought out of the convent of the Sacré Cœur at Paris, and married with immense splendour and ceremony to this princely widower. The most august names signed the book of the civil marriage. Madame la Dauphine and Madame la Duchesse de Berri complimented the young bride with royal favours. Her portrait by Dubufe was in the Exhibition next year, a charming young duchess indeed, with black eyes, and black ringlets, pearls on her neck, and diamonds in her hair, as beautiful as a princess of a fairy tale. M. d’Ivry, whose early life may have been rather oragious, was yet a gentleman perfectly well conserved. Resolute against fate his enemy (one would fancy fate was of an aristocratic turn, and took especial delight in combats with princely houses; the Atridae, the Borbonidae, the Ivrys,—the Browns and Joneses being of no account), the prince seemed to be determined not only to secure a progeny, but to defy age. At sixty he was still young, or seemed to be so. His hair was as black as the princess’s own, his teeth as white. If you saw him on the Boulevard de Gand, sunning among the youthful exquisites there, or riding au Bois, with a grace worthy of old Franconi himself, you would take him for one of the young men, of whom indeed up to his marriage he retained a number of the graceful follies and amusements, though his manners had a dignity acquired in old days of Versailles and the Trianon, which the moderns cannot hope to imitate. He was as assiduous behind the scenes of the opera as any journalist, or any young dandy of twenty years. He “ranged himself,” as the French phrase is, shortly before his marriage, just like any other young bachelor: took leave of Phryne and Aspasie in the coulisses, and proposed to devote himself henceforth to his charming young wife.
The affreux catastrophe of July arrived. The ancient Bourbons were once more on the road to exile (save one wily old remnant of the race, who rode grinning over the barricades, and distributing poignees de main to the stout fists that had pummelled his family out of France). M. le Duc d’Ivry, who lost his place at court, his appointments which helped his income very much, and his peerage would no more acknowledge the usurper of Neuilly, than him of Elba. The ex-peer retired to his terres. He barricaded his house in Paris against all supporters of the citizen king; his nearest kinsman, M. de Florac, among the rest, who for his part cheerfully took his oath of fidelity, and his seat in Louis Philippe’s house of peers, having indeed been accustomed to swear to all dynasties for some years past.