An Old Maid | Page 7

to the period of which we are writing: after about fifteen
years of this way of life the chevalier had amassed ten thousand and
some odd hundred francs. On the return of the Bourbons, one of his old
friends, the Marquis de Pombreton, formerly lieutenant in the Black
mousquetaires, returned to him--so he said--twelve hundred pistoles
which he had lent to the marquis for the purpose of emigrating. This
event made a sensation; it was used later to refute the sarcasms of the
"Constitutionnel," on the method employed by some emigres in paying
their debts. When this noble act of the Marquis de Pombreton was

lauded before the chevalier, the good man reddened even to his right
cheek. Every one rejoiced frankly at this windfall for Monsieur de
Valois, who went about consulting moneyed people as to the safest
manner of investing this fragment of his past opulence. Confiding in
the future of the Restoration, he finally placed his money on the
Grand-Livre at the moment when the funds were at fifty-six francs and
twenty-five centimes. Messieurs de Lenoncourt, de Navarreins, de
Verneuil, de Fontaine, and La Billardiere, to whom he was known, he
said, obtained for him, from the king's privy purse, a pension of three
hundred francs, and sent him, moreover, the cross of Saint- Louis.
Never was it known positively by what means the old chevalier
obtained these two solemn consecrations of his title and merits. But one
thing is certain; the cross of Saint-Louis authorized him to take the rank
of retired colonel in view of his service in the Catholic armies of the
West.
Besides his fiction of an annuity, about which no one at the present
time knew anything, the chevalier really had, therefore, a bona fide
income of a thousand francs. But in spite of this bettering of his
circumstances, he made no change in his life, manners, or appearance,
except that the red ribbon made a fine effect on his maroon-colored
coat, and completed, so to speak, the physiognomy of a gentleman.
After 1802, the chevalier sealed his letters with a very old seal,
ill-engraved to be sure, by which the Casterans, the d'Esgrignons, the
Troisvilles were enabled to see that he bore: Party of France, two
cottises gemelled gules, and gules, five mascles or, placed end to end;
on a chief sable, a cross argent. For crest, a knight's helmet. For motto:
"Valeo." Bearing such noble arms, the so-called bastard of the Valois
had the right to get into all the royal carriages of the world.
Many persons envied the quiet existence of this old bachelor, spent on
whist, boston, backgammon, reversi, and piquet, all well played, on
dinners well digested, snuff gracefully inhaled, and tranquil walks
about the town. Nearly all Alencon believed this life to be exempt from
ambitions and serious interests; but no man has a life as simple as
envious neighbors attribute to him. You will find in the most out-
of-the way villages human mollusks, creatures apparently dead, who

have passions for lepidoptera or for conchology, let us say,--beings
who will give themselves infinite pains about moths, butterflies, or the
concha Veneris. Not only did the chevalier have his own particular
shells, but he cherished an ambitious desire which he pursued with a
craft so profound as to be worthy of Sixtus the Fifth: he wanted to
marry a certain rich old maid, with the intention, no doubt, of making
her a stepping-stone by which to reach the more elevated regions of the
court. There, then, lay the secret of his royal bearing and of his
residence in Alencon.


CHAPTER II
SUSANNAH AND THE ELDERS
On a Wednesday morning, early, toward the middle of spring, in the
year 16,--such was his mode of reckoning,--at the moment when the
chevalier was putting on his old green-flowered damask dressing-gown,
he heard, despite the cotton in his ears, the light step of a young girl
who was running up the stairway. Presently three taps were discreetly
struck upon the door; then, without waiting for any response, a
handsome girl slipped like an eel into the room occupied by the old
bachelor.
"Ah! is it you, Suzanne?" said the Chevalier de Valois, without
discontinuing his occupation, which was that of stropping his razor.
"What have you come for, my dear little jewel of mischief?"
"I have come to tell you something which may perhaps give you as
much pleasure as pain?"
"Is it anything about Cesarine?"
"Cesarine! much I care about your Cesarine!" she said with a saucy air,
half serious, half indifferent.

This charming Suzanne, whose present comical performance was to
exercise a great influence in the principal personages of our history,
was a work-girl at Madame Lardot's. One word here on the topography
of the house. The wash-rooms occupied