The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel

The Reflections of Ambrosine, by
Elinor Glyn

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Title: The Reflections of Ambrosine A Novel
Author: Elinor Glyn
Release Date: March 18, 2004 [EBook #11624]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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The Reflections of Ambrosine
A Novel by

Elinor Glyn

NOTE
In thanking the readers who were kind enough to appreciate my "Visits
of Elizabeth," I take this opportunity of saying that I did not write the
two other books which appeared anonymously. The titles of those
works were so worded that they gave the public the impression that I
was their author. I have never written any book but the "Visits of
Elizabeth." Everything that I write will be signed with my name,
ELINOR GLYN

BOOK I

I
I have wondered sometimes if there are not perhaps some
disadvantages in having really blue blood in one's veins, like
grandmamma and me. For instance, if we were ordinary, common
people our teeth would chatter naturally with cold when we have to go
to bed without fires in our rooms in December; but we pretend we like
sleeping in "well-aired rooms"--at least I have to. Grandmamma simply
says we are obliged to make these small economies, and to grumble
would be to lose a trick to fate.
"Rebel if you can improve matters," she often tells me, "but otherwise
accept them with calmness."
We have had to accept a good many things with calmness since papa
made that tiresome speculation in South America. Before that we had a
nice apartment in Paris and as many fires as we wished. However, in
spite of the comfort, grandmamma hated papa's "making" money. It
was not the career of a gentleman, she said, and when the smash came

and one heard no more of papa, I have an idea she was almost relieved.
We came first over to England, and, after long wanderings backward
and forward, took this little furnished place at the corner of Ledstone
Park. It is just a cottage--once a keeper's, I believe--and we have only
Hephzibah and a wretched servant-girl to wait on us. Hephzibah was
my nurse in America before we ever went to Paris, and she is as ugly as
a card-board face on Guy Fawkes day, and as good as gold.
Grandmamma has had a worrying life. She was brought up at the court
of Charles X.--can one believe it, all those years ago!--her family up to
that having lived in Ireland since the great Revolution. Indeed, her
mother was Irish, and I think grandmamma still speaks French with an
accent. (I hope she will never know I said that.) Her name was
Mademoiselle de Calincourt, the daughter of the Marquis de Calincourt,
whose family had owned Calincourt since the time of Charlemagne or
something before that. So it was annoying for them to have had their
heads chopped off and to be obliged to live in Dublin on nothing a year.
The grandmother of grandmamma, Ambrosine Eustasie de Calincourt,
after whom I am called, was a famous character. She was so
good-looking that Robespierre offered to let her retain her head if she
would give him a kiss, but she preferred to drive to the guillotine in the
cart with her friends, only she took a rose to keep off the smell of the
common people, and, they say, ran up the steps smiling. Grandmamma
has her miniature, and it is, she says, exactly like me.
I have heard that grandmamma's marriage with grandpapa--an
Englishman--was considered at the time to be a very suitable affair. He
had also ancestors since before Edward the Confessor. However,
unfortunately, a few years after their marriage (grandmamma was
really un peu passée when that took place) grandpapa made a
bêtise--something political or diplomatic, but I have never heard
exactly what; anyway, it obliged them to leave hurriedly and go to
America. Grandmamma never speaks of her life there or of grandpapa,
so I suppose he died, because when I first remember things we were
crossing to France in a big ship--just papa, grandmamma, and I. My
mother died when I was born. She was an American of one of the first

original families in Virginia; that is all I know of her. We have never
had a great many friends--even when we lived in Paris--because, you
see, as