The Jealousies of a Country Town | Page 4

have
been thought a trifle too dainty.
We must here compel ourselves to spoil this portrait by the avowal of a
littleness. The chevalier put cotton in his ears, and wore, appended to
them, two little ear-rings representing negroes' heads in diamonds, of
admirable workmanship. He clung to these singular appendages,
explaining that since his ears had been bored he had ceased to have
headaches (he had had headaches). We do not present the chevalier as
an accomplished man; but surely we can pardon, in an old celibate
whose heart sends so much blood to his left cheek, these adorable
qualities, founded, perhaps, on some sublime secret history.
Besides, the Chevalier de Valois redeemed those negroes' heads by so
many other graces that society felt itself sufficiently compensated. He
really took such immense trouble to conceal his age and give pleasure
to his friends. In the first place, we must call attention to the extreme
care he gave to his linen, the only distinction that well- bred men can
nowadays exhibit in their clothes. The linen of the chevalier was
invariably of a fineness and whiteness that were truly aristocratic. As
for his coat, though remarkable for its cleanliness, it was always half
worn-out, but without spots or creases. The preservation of that
garment was something marvellous to those who noticed the chevalier's
high-bred indifference to its shabbiness. He did not go so far as to

scrape the seams with glass,--a refinement invented by the Prince of
Wales; but he did practice the rudiments of English elegance with a
personal satisfaction little understood by the people of Alencon. The
world owes a great deal to persons who take such pains to please it. In
this there is certainly some accomplishment of that most difficult
precept of the Gospel about rendering good for evil. This freshness of
ablution and all the other little cares harmonized charmingly with the
blue eyes, the ivory teeth, and the blond person of the old chevalier.
The only blemish was that this retired Adonis had nothing manly about
him; he seemed to be employing this toilet varnish to hide the ruins
occasioned by the military service of gallantry only. But we must
hasten to add that his voice produced what might be called an antithesis
to his blond delicacy. Unless you adopted the opinion of certain
observers of the human heart, and thought that the chevalier had the
voice of his nose, his organ of speech would have amazed you by its
full and redundant sound. Without possessing the volume of classical
bass voices, the tone of it was pleasing from a slightly muffled quality
like that of an English bugle, which is firm and sweet, strong but
velvety.
The chevalier had repudiated the ridiculous costume still preserved by
certain monarchical old men; he had frankly modernized himself. He
was always seen in a maroon-colored coat with gilt buttons, half-tight
breeches of poult-de-soie with gold buckles, a white waistcoat without
embroidery, and a tight cravat showing no shirt-collar,--a last vestige of
the old French costume which he did not renounce, perhaps, because it
enabled him to show a neck like that of the sleekest abbe. His shoes
were noticeable for their square buckles, a style of which the present
generation has no knowledge; these buckles were fastened to a square
of polished black leather. The chevalier allowed two watch-chains to
hang parallel to each other from each of his waistcoat pockets,--another
vestige of the eighteenth century, which the Incroyables had not
disdained to use under the Directory. This transition costume, uniting
as it did two centuries, was worn by the chevalier with the high-bred
grace of an old French marquis, the secret of which is lost to France
since the day when Fleury, Mole's last pupil, vanished.

The private life of this old bachelor was apparently open to all eyes,
though in fact it was quite mysterious. He lived in a lodging that was
modest, to say the best of it, in the rue du Cours, on the second floor of
a house belonging to Madame Lardot, the best and busiest
washerwoman in the town. This circumstance will explain the
excessive nicety of his linen. Ill-luck would have it that the day came
when Alencon was guilty of believing that the chevalier had not always
comported himself as a gentleman should, and that in fact he was
secretly married in his old age to a certain Cesarine,--the mother of a
child which had had the impertinence to come into the world without
being called for.
"He had given his hand," as a certain Monsieur du Bousquier remarked,
"to the person who had long had him under irons."
This horrible calumny embittered the last days of the dainty chevalier
all the more because, as the present Scene will show,