So, occasionally, Mr. Clive had the good luck to meet with his cousin at the Hôtel de Florac, where, I dare say, all the inhabitants wished he should have his desire regarding this young lady. The Colonel had talked early to Madame de Florac about this wish of his life, impossible then to gratify, because Ethel was engaged to Lord Kew. Clive, in the fulness of his heart, imparted his passion to Florac, and in answer to Paul’s offer to himself, had shown the Frenchman that kind letter in which his father bade him carry aid to “Léonore de Florac’s son,” in case he should need it. The case was all clear to the lively Paul. “Between my mother and your good Colonel there must have been an affair of the heart in the early days during the emigration.” Clive owned his father had told him as much, at least that he himself had been attached to Mademoiselle de Blois. “It is for that that her heart yearns towards thee, that I have felt myself entrained toward thee since I saw thee”—Clive momentarily expected to be kissed again. “Tell thy father that I feel—am touched by his goodness with an eternal gratitude, and love every one that loves my mother.” As far as wishes went, these two were eager promoters of Clive’s little love-affair; and Madame la Princesse became equally not less willing. Clive’s good looks and good-nature had had their effects upon that good-natured woman, and he was as great a favourite with her as with her husband. And thus it happened that when Miss Ethel came to pay her visit, and sate with Madame de Florac and her grandchildren in the garden, Mr. Newcome would sometimes walk up the avenue there, and salute the ladies.
If Ethel had not wanted to see him, would she have come? Yes; she used to say she was going to Madame de Préville’s, not Madame de Florac’s, and would insist, I have no doubt, that it was Madame de Préville whom she went to see (whose husband was a member of the Chamber of Deputies, a Conseiller d’etat; or other French bigwig), and that she had no idea of going to meet Clive, or that he was more than a casual acquaintance at the Hôtel de Florac. There was no part of her conduct in all her life, which this lady, when it was impugned, would defend more strongly than this intimacy at the Hôtel de Florac. It is not with this I quarrel especially. My fair young readers, who have seen a half-dozen of seasons, can you call to mind the time when you had such a friendship for Emma Tomkins, that you were always at the Tomkins’s, and notes were constantly passing between your house and hers? When her brother, Paget Tomkins, returned to India, did not your intimacy with Emma fall off? If your younger sister is not in the room, I know you will own as much to me. I think you are always deceiving yourselves and other people. I think the motive you put forward is very often not the real one; though you will confess, neither to yourself, nor to any human being, what the real motive is. I think that what you desire you pursue, and are as selfish in your way as your bearded fellow-creatures are. And as for the truth being in you, of all the women in a great acquaintance, I protest there are but—never mind. A perfectly honest woman, a woman who never flatters, who never manages, who never cajoles, who never conceals, who never uses her eyes, who never speculates on the effect which she produces, who never is conscious of unspoken admiration, what a monster, I say, would such a female be! Miss Hopkins, you have been a coquette since you were a year old; you worked on your papa’s friends in the nurse’s arms by the fascination of your lace frock and pretty new sash and shoes; when you could just toddle, you practised your arts upon other children in the square, poor little lambkins sporting among the daisies; and nunc in ovilia, mox in reluctantes dracones, proceeding from the lambs to reluctant dragoons, you tried your arts upon Captain Paget Tomkins, who behaved so ill, and went to India without—without making those proposals which of course you never expected. Your intimacy was with Emma. It has cooled. Your sets are different. The Tomkins’s are not quite etc. etc. You believe Captain Tomkins married a Miss O’Grady, etc. etc. Ah, my pretty, my sprightly Miss Hopkins, be gentle in your judgment of your neighbours!
CHAPTER XLVII.
Contains two or three Acts of a Little Comedy
All this story is told by one, who, if he was not actually present at the circumstances here narrated, yet had information concerning them, and could supply such a narrative of facts and conversations as is, indeed, not less authentic than the details we have of other histories. How can I tell the feelings in a young lady’s mind; the thoughts in a young gentleman’s bosom?—As Professor Owen or Professor Agassiz takes a fragment of a bone, and builds an enormous forgotten monster out of it, wallowing in primeval quagmires, tearing down leaves and branches of plants that flourished thousands of years ago, and perhaps may be coal by this time—so the novelist puts this and that together: from the footprint finds the foot; from the foot, the brute who trod on it; from the brute, the plant he browsed on, the marsh in which he swam—and thus in his humble way a physiologist too, depicts the habits, size, appearance of the beings whereof he has to treat;—traces this slimy reptile through the mud, and describes his habits filthy and rapacious; prods down this butterfly with a pin, and depicts his beautiful coat and embroidered waistcoat; points out the singular structure of yonder more important animal, the megatherium of his history.
Suppose then, in the quaint old garden of the Hôtel de Florac, two young people are walking up and down in an avenue of lime-trees, which are still permitted to grow in that ancient place. In the centre of that avenue is a fountain, surmounted by a Triton so grey and moss-eaten, that though he holds his conch to his swelling lips, curling his tail in the arid basin, his instrument has had a sinecure for at least fifty years; and did not think fit even to play when the Bourbons, in whose time he was erected, came back from their exile. At the end of the lime-tree avenue is a broken-nosed damp Faun, with a marble panpipe, who pipes to the spirit ditties which I believe never had any tune. The perron of the hotel is at the other end of the avenue; a couple of Cæsars on either side of the door-window, from which the inhabitants of the hotel issue into the garden—Caracalla frowning over his mouldy shoulder at Nerva, on to whose clipped hair the roofs of the grey château have been dribbling for ever so many long years. There are more statues gracing this noble place. There is Cupid, who has been at the point of kissing Psyche this half-century at least, though the delicious event has never come off, through all those blazing summers and dreary winters: there is Venus and her Boy under the damp little dome of a cracked old temple. Through the alley of this old garden, in which their ancestors have disported in hoops and powder, Monsieur de Florac’s chair is wheeled by St. Jean, his attendant; Madame de Préville’s children trot about, and skip, and play at cache-cache. The R. P. de Florac (when at home) paces up and down and meditates his sermons; Madame de Florac sadly walks sometimes to look at her roses; and Clive and Ethel Newcome are marching up and down; the children, and their bonne of course being there, jumping to and fro; and Madame de Florac, having just been called away to Monsieur le Comte, whose physician has come to see him.
Ethel says, “How charming and odd this solitude is: and how pleasant to hear the voices of the children playing in the neighbouring Convent garden,” of which they can see the new chapel rising over the trees.
Clive remarks that “the neighbouring hotel has curiously changed its destination. One of the members of the Directory had it; and, no doubt, in the groves of its garden, Madame Tallien, and Madame Recamier, and Madame Beauharnais have danced under the lamps. Then a Marshal of the Empire inhabited it. Then it was restored to its legitimate owner, Monsieur le Marquis de Bricquabracque, whose descendants, having a lawsuit about the Bricquabracque succession, sold the hotel to the Convent.”
After some talk about nuns, Ethel says, “There were convents in England. She often thinks she would like to retire to one;” and she sighs as if her heart were in that scheme.
Clive, with a laugh, says, “Yes. If you could retire after the season, when you were very weary of the balls, a convent would be very nice. At Rome he had seen San Pietro in Montorio and Sant Onofrio, that delightful old place where Tasso died: people go and make a retreat there. In the ladies’ convents, the ladies do the same thing—and he doubts whether they are much more or less wicked after their retreat, than gentlemen and ladies in England or France.”
Ethel. Why do you sneer at all faith? Why should not a retreat do people good? Do you suppose the world is so satisfactory, that those who are in it never wish for a while to leave it’d (She heaves a sigh and looks down towards a beautiful new dress of many flounces, which Madame de Flouncival, the great milliner, has sent her home that very day.)