The Jealousies of a Country Town | Page 6

at Turin, so agreeable a mummy. In no country in
the world did parasitism ever take on so pleasant a form. Never did
selfishness of a most concentrated kind appear less forth-putting, less
offensive, than in this old gentleman; it stood him in place of devoted
friendship. If some one asked Monsieur de Valois to do him a little
service which might have discommoded him, that some one did not
part from the worthy chevalier without being truly enchanted with him,
and quite convinced that he either could not do the service demanded,
or that he should injure the affair if he meddled in it.
To explain the problematic existence of the chevalier, the historian,
whom Truth, that cruel wanton, grasps by the throat, is compelled to
say that after the "glorious" sad days of July, Alencon discovered that
the chevalier's nightly winnings amounted to about one hundred and
fifty francs every three months; and that the clever old nobleman had
had the pluck to send to himself his annuity in order not to appear in
the eyes of a community, which loves the main chance, to be entirely
without resources. Many of his friends (he was by that time dead, you
will please remark) have contested mordicus this curious fact, declaring
it to be a fable, and upholding the Chevalier de Valois as a respectable
and worthy gentleman whom the liberals calumniated. Luckily for

shrewd players, there are people to be found among the spectators who
will always sustain them. Ashamed of having to defend a piece of
wrong-doing, they stoutly deny it. Do not accuse them of wilful
infatuation; such men have a sense of their dignity; governments set
them the example of a virtue which consists in burying their dead
without chanting the Misere of their defeats. If the chevalier did allow
himself this bit of shrewd practice,--which, by the bye, would have won
him the regard of the Chevalier de Gramont, a smile from the Baron de
Foeneste, a shake of the hand from the Marquis de Moncade,--was he
any the less that amiable guest, that witty talker, that imperturbable
card-player, that famous teller of anecdotes, in whom all Alencon took
delight? Besides, in what way was this action, which is certainly within
the rights of a man's own will, --in what way was it contrary to the
ethics of a gentleman? When so many persons are forced to pay
annuities to others, what more natural than to pay one to his own best
friend? But Laius is dead--
To return to the period of which we are writing: after about fifteen
years of this way of life the chevalier had amassed ten thousand and
some odd hundred francs. On the return of the Bourbons, one of his old
friends, the Marquis de Pombreton, formerly lieutenant in the Black
mousquetaires, returned to him--so he said--twelve hundred pistoles
which he had lent to the marquis for the purpose of emigrating. This
event made a sensation; it was used later to refute the sarcasms of the
"Constitutionnel," on the method employed by some emigres in paying
their debts. When this noble act of the Marquis de Pombreton was
lauded before the chevalier, the good man reddened even to his right
cheek. Every one rejoiced frankly at this windfall for Monsieur de
Valois, who went about consulting moneyed people as to the safest
manner of investing this fragment of his past opulence. Confiding in
the future of the Restoration, he finally placed his money on the
Grand-Livre at the moment when the funds were at fifty-six francs and
twenty-five centimes. Messieurs de Lenoncourt, de Navarreins, de
Verneuil, de Fontaine, and La Billardiere, to whom he was known, he
said, obtained for him, from the king's privy purse, a pension of three
hundred francs, and sent him, moreover, the cross of Saint- Louis.
Never was it known positively by what means the old chevalier

obtained these two solemn consecrations of his title and merits. But one
thing is certain; the cross of Saint-Louis authorized him to take the rank
of retired colonel in view of his service in the Catholic armies of the
West.
Besides his fiction of an annuity, about which no one at the present
time knew anything, the chevalier really had, therefore, a bona fide
income of a thousand francs. But in spite of this bettering of his
circumstances, he made no change in his life, manners, or appearance,
except that the red ribbon made a fine effect on his maroon-colored
coat, and completed, so to speak, the physiognomy of a gentleman.
After 1802, the chevalier sealed his letters with a very old seal,
ill-engraved to be sure, by which the Casterans, the d'Esgrignons, the
Troisvilles were enabled to see that he bore: Party of France, two
cottises gemelled