The Jealousies of a Country Town | Page 8

like trifles adored by grisettes; consequently, the
kind old gentleman was adored in return. Women have an instinct
which enables them to divine the men who love them, who like to be
near them, and exact no payment for gallantries. In this respect women
have the instinct of dogs, who in a mixed company will go straight to
the man to whom animals are sacred.
The poor Chevalier de Valois retained from his former life the need of
bestowing gallant protection, a quality of the seigneurs of other days.

Faithful to the system of the "petite maison," he liked to enrich
women,--the only beings who know how to receive, because they can
always return. But the poor chevalier could no longer ruin himself for a
mistress. Instead of the choicest bonbons wrapped in bank-bills, he
gallantly presented paper-bags full of toffee. Let us say to the glory of
Alencon that the toffee was accepted with more joy than la Duthe ever
showed at a gilt service or a fine equipage offered by the Comte
d'Artois. All these grisettes fully understood the fallen majesty of the
Chevalier de Valois, and they kept their private familiarities with him a
profound secret for his sake. If they were questioned about him in
certain houses when they carried home the linen, they always spoke
respectfully of the chevalier, and made him out older than he really was;
they talked of him as a most respectable monsieur, whose life was a
flower of sanctity; but once in their own regions they perched on his
shoulders like so many parrots. He liked to be told the secrets which
washerwomen discover in the bosom of households, and day after day
these girls would tell him the cancans which were going the round of
Alencon. He called them his "petticoat gazettes," his "talking
feuilletons." Never did Monsieur de Sartines have spies more
intelligent and less expensive, or minions who showed more honor
while displaying their rascality of mind. So it may be said that in the
mornings, while breakfasting, the chevalier usually amused himself as
much as the saints in heaven.
Suzanne was one of his favorites, a clever, ambitious girl, made of the
stuff of a Sophie Arnold, and handsome withal, as the handsomest
courtesan invited by Titian to pose on black velvet for a model of
Venus; although her face, fine about the eyes and forehead,
degenerated, lower down, into commonness of outline. Hers was a
Norman beauty, fresh, high-colored, redundant, the flesh of Rubens
covering the muscles of the Farnese Hercules, and not the slender
articulations of the Venus de' Medici, Apollo's graceful consort.
"Well, my child, tell me your great or your little adventure, whatever it
is."
The particular point about the chevalier which would have made him

noticeable from Paris to Pekin, was the gentle paternity of his manner
to grisettes. They reminded him of the illustrious operatic queens of his
early days, whose celebrity was European during a good third of the
eighteenth century. It is certain that the old gentleman, who had lived in
days gone by with that feminine nation now as much forgotten as many
other great things,--like the Jesuits, the Buccaneers, the Abbes, and the
Farmers-General,--had acquired an irresistible good- humor, a kindly
ease, a laisser-aller devoid of egotism, the self- effacement of Jupiter
with Alcmene, of the king intending to be duped, who casts his
thunderbolts to the devil, wants his Olympus full of follies, little
suppers, feminine profusions--but with Juno out of the way, be it
understood.
In spite of his old green damask dressing-gown and the bareness of the
room in which he sat, where the floor was covered with a shabby
tapestry in place of carpet, and the walls were hung with tavern-paper
presenting the profiles of Louis XVI. and members of his family, traced
among the branches of a weeping willow with other sentimentalities
invented by royalism during the Terror,--in spite of his ruins, the
chevalier, trimming his beard before a shabby old toilet-table, draped
with trumpery lace, exhaled an essence of the eighteenth century. All
the libertine graces of his youth reappeared; he seemed to have the
wealth of three hundred thousand francs of debt, while his vis-a-vis
waited before the door. He was grand,--like Berthier on the retreat from
Moscow, issuing orders to an army that existed no longer.
"Monsieur le chevalier," replied Suzanne, drolly, "seems to me I
needn't tell you anything; you've only to look."
And Suzanne presented a side view of herself which gave a sort of
lawyer's comment to her words. The chevalier, who, you must know,
was a sly old bird, lowered his right eye on the grisette, still holding the
razor at his throat, and pretended to understand.
"Well, well, my little duck, we'll talk about that