The Ball at Sceaux | Page 6

"Though I see the rhyme of it, I fail to see the reason," retorted the
King, who did not relish any pleasantry, however mild, on the subject
of his poetry.
From that day his intercourse with Monsieur de Fontaine showed less
amenity. Kings enjoy contradicting more than people think. Like most
youngest children, Emilie de Fontaine was a Benjamin spoilt by almost
everybody. The King's coolness, therefore, caused the Count all the
more regret, because no marriage was ever so difficult to arrange as
that of this darling daughter. To understand all the obstacles we must
make our way into the fine residence where the official was housed at
the expense of the nation. Emilie had spent her childhood on the family
estate, enjoying the abundance which suffices for the joys of early
youth; her lightest wishes had been law to her sisters, her brothers, her
mother, and even her father. All her relations doted on her. Having
come to years of discretion just when her family was loaded with the
favors of fortune, the enchantment of life continued. The luxury of
Paris seemed to her just as natural as a wealth of flowers or fruit, or as
the rural plenty which had been the joy of her first years. Just as in her
childhood she had never been thwarted in the satisfaction of her playful
desires, so now, at fourteen, she was still obeyed when she rushed into
the whirl of fashion.
Thus, accustomed by degrees to the enjoyment of money, elegance of
dress, of gilded drawing-rooms and fine carriages, became as necessary
to her as the compliments of flattery, sincere or false, and the festivities
and vanities of court life. Like most spoiled children, she tyrannized
over those who loved her, and kept her blandishments for those who
were indifferent. Her faults grew with her growth, and her parents were
to gather the bitter fruits of this disastrous education. At the age of
nineteen Emilie de Fontaine had not yet been pleased to make a choice
from among the many young men whom her father's politics brought to
his entertainments. Though so young, she asserted in society all the
freedom of mind that a married woman can enjoy. Her beauty was so

remarkable that, for her, to appear in a room was to be its queen; but,
like sovereigns, she had no friends, though she was everywhere the
object of attentions to which a finer nature than hers might perhaps
have succumbed. Not a man, not even an old man, had it in him to
contradict the opinions of a young girl whose lightest look could
rekindle love in the coldest heart.
She had been educated with a care which her sisters had not enjoyed;
painted pretty well, spoke Italian and English, and played the piano
brilliantly; her voice, trained by the best masters, had a ring in it which
made her singing irresistibly charming. Clever, and intimate with every
branch of literature, she might have made folks believe that, as
Mascarille says, people of quality come into the world knowing
everything. She could argue fluently on Italian or Flemish painting, on
the Middle Ages or the Renaissance; pronounced at haphazard on
books new or old, and could expose the defects of a work with a cruelly
graceful wit. The simplest thing she said was accepted by an admiring
crowd as a fetfah of the Sultan by the Turks. She thus dazzled shallow
persons; as to deeper minds, her natural tact enabled her to discern
them, and for them she put forth so much fascination that, under cover
of her charms, she escaped their scrutiny. This enchanting veneer
covered a careless heart; the opinion--common to many young
girls--that no one else dwelt in a sphere so lofty as to be able to
understand the merits of her soul; and a pride based no less on her birth
than on her beauty. In the absence of the overwhelming sentiment
which, sooner or later, works havoc in a woman's heart, she spent her
young ardor in an immoderate love of distinctions, and expressed the
deepest contempt for persons of inferior birth. Supremely impertinent
to all newly-created nobility, she made every effort to get her parents
recognized as equals by the most illustrious families of the
Saint-Germain quarter.
These sentiments had not escaped the observing eye of Monsieur de
Fontaine, who more than once, when his two elder girls were married,
had smarted under Emilie's sarcasm. Logical readers will be surprised
to see the old Royalist bestowing his eldest daughter on a Receiver-
General, possessed, indeed, of some old hereditary estates, but whose
name was not preceded by the little word to which the throne owed so
many partisans, and his second to a magistrate too lately Baronified to

obscure the fact that