Letters of Two Brides | Page 5

for me. You will not see me
here again till my royal lover has deserted me, and I warn you that if I
catch him, death alone shall tear him from me. I fear no Montespan."
She smiled and said:
"Go, madcap, and take your idle fancies with you. There is certainly
more of the bold Montespan in you than of the gentle la Valliere."
I threw my arms round her. The poor lady could not refrain from
escorting me to the carriage. There her tender gaze was divided
between me and the armorial bearings.
At Beaugency night overtook me, still sunk in a stupor of the mind
produced by these strange parting words. What can be awaiting me in
this world for which I have so hungered?
To begin with, I found no one to receive me; my heart had been
schooled in vain. My mother was at the Bois de Boulogne, my father at
the Council; my brother, the Duc de Rhetore, never comes in, I am told,
till it is time to dress for dinner. Miss Griffith (she is not unlike a griffin)
and Philippe took me to my rooms.
The suite is the one which belonged to my beloved grandmother, the
Princess de Vauremont, to whom I owe some sort of a fortune which no
one has ever told me about. As you read this, you will understand the
sadness which came over me as I entered a place sacred to so many
memories, and found the rooms just as she had left them! I was to sleep
in the bed where she died.
Sitting down on the edge of the sofa, I burst into tears, forgetting I was
not alone, and remembering only how often I had stood there by her
knees, the better to hear her words. There I had gazed upon her face,
buried in its brown laces, and worn as much by age as by the pangs of
approaching death. The room seemed to me still warm with the heat
which she kept up there. How comes it that Armande-Louise-Marie de
Chaulieu must be like some peasant girl, who sleeps in her mother's

bed the very morrow of her death? For to me it was as though the
Princess, who died in 1817, had passed away but yesterday.
I saw many things in the room which ought to have been removed.
Their presence showed the carelessness with which people, busy with
the affairs of state, may treat their own, and also the little thought
which had been given since her death to this grand old lady, who will
always remain one of the striking figures of the eighteenth century.
Philippe seemed to divine something of the cause of my tears. He told
me that the furniture of the Princess had been left to me in her will and
that my father had allowed all the larger suites to remain dismantled, as
the Revolution had left them. On hearing this I rose, and Philippe
opened the door of the small drawing-room which leads into the
reception-rooms.
In these I found all the well-remembered wreckage; the panels above
the doors, which had contained valuable pictures, bare of all but empty
frames; broken marbles, mirrors carried off. In old days I was afraid to
go up the state staircase and cross these vast, deserted rooms; so I used
to get to the Princess' rooms by a small staircase which runs under the
arch of the larger one and leads to the secret door of her dressing-room.
My suite, consisting of a drawing-room, bedroom, and the pretty
morning-room in scarlet and gold, of which I have told you, lies in the
wing on the side of the Invalides. The house is only separated from the
boulevard by a wall, covered with creepers, and by a splendid avenue
of trees, which mingle their foliage with that of the young elms on the
sidewalk of the boulevard. But for the blue-and-gold dome of the
Invalides and its gray stone mass, you might be in a wood.
The style of decoration in these rooms, together with their situation,
indicates that they were the old show suite of the duchesses, while the
dukes must have had theirs in the wing opposite. The two suites are
decorously separated by the two main blocks, as well as by the central
one, which contained those vast, gloomy, resounding halls shown me
by Philippe, all despoiled of their splendor, as in the days of my
childhood.

Philippe grew quite confidential when he saw the surprise depicted on
my countenance. For you must know that in this home of diplomacy
the very servants have a reserved and mysterious air. He went on to tell
me that it was expected a law would soon be passed restoring to