Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski

Olympe Zabriski, by Thomas
Bailey Aldrich

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Title: Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski
Author: Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Release Date: November 6, 2007 [EBook #23362]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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MADEMOISELLE OLYMPE ZABRISKI ***

Produced by David Widger

MADEMOISELLE OLYMPE ZABRISKI
By Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright, 1873, 1885, and 1901

I.
We are accustomed to speak with a certain light irony of the tendency
which women have to gossip, as if the sin itself, if it is a sin, were of
the gentler sex, and could by no chance be a masculine peccadillo. So
far as my observation goes, men are as much given to small talk as
women, and it is undeniable that we have produced the highest type of
gossiper extant. Where will you find, in or out of literature, such
another droll, delightful, chatty busybody as Samuel Pepys, Esq.,
Secretary to the Admiralty in the reigns of those fortunate gentlemen
Charles II. and James II. of England? He is the king of tattlers as
Shakespeare is the king of poets.
If it came to a matter of pure gossip, I would back Our Club against the
Sorosis or any women's club in existence. Whenever you see in our
drawing-room four or five young fellows lounging in easy-chairs, cigar
in hand, and now and then bringing their heads together over the small
round Japanese table which is always the pivot of these social circles,
you may be sure that they are discussing Tom's engagement, or Dick's
extravagance, or Harry's hopeless passion for the younger Miss
Fleurdelys. It is here old Tippleton gets execrated for that everlasting
bon mot of his which was quite a success at dinner-parties forty years
ago; it is here the belle of the season passes under the scalpels of
merciless young surgeons; it is here B's financial condition is handled
in a way that would make B's hair stand on end; it is here, in short, that
everything is canvassed--everything that happens in our set, I mean,
much that never happens, and a great deal that could not possibly
happen. It was at Our Club that I learned the particulars of the Van
Twiller affair.
It was great entertainment to Our Club, the Van Twiller affair, though it
was rather a joyless thing, I fancy, for Van Twiller. To understand the
case fully, it should be understood that Ralph Van Twiller is one of the
proudest and most sensitive men living. He is a lineal descendant of

Wouter Van Twiller, the famous old Dutch governor of New
York--Nieuw Amsterdam, as it was then; his ancestors have always
been burgomasters or admirals or generals, and his mother is the Mrs.
Vanrensselaer Van-zandt Van Twiller whose magnificent place will be
pointed out to you on the right bank of the Hudson, as you pass up the
historic river towards Idlewild. Ralph is about twenty-five years old.
Birth made him a gentleman, and the rise of real estate--some of it in
the family since the old governor's time--made him a millionaire. It was
a kindly fairy that stepped in and made him a good fellow also. Fortune,
I take it, was in her most jocund mood when she heaped her gifts in this
fashion on Van Twiller, who was, and will be again, when this cloud
blows over, the flower of Our Club.
About a year ago there came a whisper--if the word "whisper" is not
too harsh a term to apply to what seemed a mere breath floating gently
through the atmosphere of the billiard-room--imparting the intelligence
that Van Twiller was in some kind of trouble. Just as everybody
suddenly takes to wearing square-toed boots, or to drawing his
neckscarf through a ring, so it became all at once the fashion, without
any preconcerted agreement, for everybody to speak of Van Twilier as
a man in some way under a cloud. But what the cloud was, and how he
got under it, and why he did not get away from it, were points that
lifted themselves into the realm of pure conjecture. There was no man
in the club with strong enough wing to his imagination to soar to the
supposition that Van Twiller was embarrassed in money matters. Was
he in love? That appeared nearly as improbable; for if he had been in
love all the world--that is, perhaps a hundred first families--would have
known all about it instantly.