Gaudissart II | Page 6

alive. The apparition put you in mind of the Commandant's statue in Don Juan, it walked along, jerkily by fits and starts, in an awkward fashion invented in London, and cultivated in every family with patriotic care.
"An Englishwoman!" he continued for Bixiou's ear. "An Englishwoman is our Waterloo. There are women who slip through our fingers like eels; we catch them on the staircase. There are lorettes who chaff us, we join in the laugh, we have a hold on them because we give credit. There are sphinx-like foreign ladies; we take a quantity of shawls to their houses, and arrive at an understanding by flattery; but an Englishwoman!--you might as well attack the bronze statue of Louis Quatorze! That sort of woman turns shopping into an occupation, an amusement. She quizzes us, forsooth!"
The romantic assistant came to the front.
"Does madame wish for real Indian shawls or French, something expensive or----"
"I will see." (Je veraie.)
"How much would madame propose----"
"I will see."
The shopman went in quest of shawls to spread upon the mantle-stand, giving his colleagues a significant glance. "What a bore!" he said plainly, with an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders.
"These are our best quality in Indian red, blue, and pale orange--all at ten thousand francs. Here are shawls at five thousand francs, and others at three."
The Englishwoman took up her eyeglass and looked round the room with gloomy indifference; then she submitted the three stands to the same scrutiny, and made no sign.
"Have you any more?" (Havaivod'hote?) demanded she.
"Yes, madame. But perhaps madame has not quite decided to take a shawl?"
"Oh, quite decided" (trei-deycidai).
The young man went in search of cheaper wares. These he spread out solemnly as if they were things of price, saying by his manner, "Pay attention to all this magnificence!"
"These are much more expensive," said he. "They have never been worn; they have come by courier direct from the manufacturers at Lahore."
"Oh! I see," said she; "they are much more like the thing I want."
The shopman kept his countenance in spite of inward irritation, which communicated itself to Duronceret and Bixiou. The Englishwoman, cool as a cucumber, appeared to rejoice in her phlegmatic humor.
"What price?" she asked, indicating a sky-blue shawl covered with a pattern of birds nestling in pagodas.
"Seven thousand francs."
She took it up, wrapped it about her shoulders, looked in the glass, and handed it back again.
"No, I do not like it at all." (Je n'ame pouinte.)
A long quarter of an hour went by in trying on other shawls; to no purpose.
"This is all we have, madame," said the assistant, glancing at the master as he spoke.
"Madame is fastidious, like all persons of taste," said the head of the establishment, coming forward with that tradesman's suavity in which pomposity is agreeably blended with subservience. The Englishwoman took up her eyeglass and scanned the manufacturer from head to foot, unwilling to understand that the man before her was eligible for Parliament and dined at the Tuileries.
"I have only one shawl left," he continued, "but I never show it. It is not to everybody's taste; it is quite out of the common. I was thinking of giving it to my wife. We have had it in stock since 1805; it belonged to the Empress Josephine."
"Let me see it, monsieur."
"Go for it," said the master, turning to a shopman. "It is at my house."
"I should be very much pleased to see it," said the English lady.
This was a triumph. The splenetic dame was apparently on the point of going. She made as though she saw nothing but the shawls; but all the while she furtively watched the shopmen and the two customers, sheltering her eyes behind the rims of her eyeglasses.
"It cost sixty thousand francs in Turkey, madame."
"Oh!" (hau!)
"It is one of seven shawls which Selim sent, before his fall, to the Emperor Napoleon. The Empress Josephine, a Creole, as you know, my lady, and very capricious in her tastes, exchanged this one for another brought by the Turkish ambassador, and purchased by my predecessor; but I have never seen the money back. Our ladies in France are not rich enough; it is not as it is in England. The shawl is worth seven thousand francs; and taking interest and compound interest altogether, it makes up fourteen or fifteen thousand by now--"
"How does it make up?" asked the Englishwoman.
"Here it is, madame."
With precautions, which a custodian of the Dresden Grune Gewolbe might have admired, he took out an infinitesimal key and opened a square cedar-wood box. The Englishwoman was much impressed with its shape and plainness. From that box, lined with black satin, he drew a shawl worth about fifteen hundred francs, a black pattern on a golden-yellow ground, of which the startling color was only surpassed by the surprising efforts of the Indian imagination.
"Splendid,"