The Thirteen | Page 9

one beheld him, he
suffered tears of rage to flow down his cheeks unchecked. At last the
sight of the shadows moving behind the lighted windows gave him
such pain that he looked elsewhere and noticed a hackney-coach,
standing against a wall in the upper part of the rue des Vieux-Augustins,
at a place where there was neither the door of a house, nor the light of a
shop-window.
Was it she? Was it not she? Life or death to a lover! This lover waited.
He stood there during a century of twenty minutes. After that the
woman came down, and he then recognized her as the one whom he
secretly loved. Nevertheless, he wanted still to doubt. She went to the
hackney-coach, and got into it.
"The house will always be there and I can search it later," thought the
young man, following the carriage at a run, to solve his last doubts; and
soon he did so.
The carriage stopped in the rue de Richelieu before a shop for artificial
flowers, close to the rue de Menars. The lady got out, entered the shop,
sent out the money to pay the coachman, and presently left the shop
herself, on foot, after buying a bunch of marabouts. Marabouts for her
black hair! The officer beheld her, through the window-panes, placing
the feathers to her head to see the effect, and he fancied he could hear

the conversation between herself and the shop-woman.
"Oh! madame, nothing is more suitable for brunettes: brunettes have
something a little too strongly marked in their lines, and marabouts
give them just that /flow/ which they lack. Madame la Duchesse de
Langeais says they give a woman something vague, Ossianic, and very
high-bred."
"Very good; send them to me at once."
Then the lady turned quickly toward the rue de Menars, and entered her
own house. When the door closed on her, the young lover, having lost
his hopes, and worse, far worse, his dearest beliefs, walked through the
streets like a drunken man, and presently found himself in his own
room without knowing how he came there. He flung himself into an
arm- chair, put his head in his hands and his feet on the andirons,
drying his boots until he burned them. It was an awful moment,--one of
those moments in human life when the character is moulded, and the
future conduct of the best of men depends on the good or evil fortune
of his first action. Providence or fatality?--choose which you will.
This young man belonged to a good family, whose nobility was not
very ancient; but there are so few really old families in these days, that
all men of rank are ancient without dispute. His grandfather had bought
the office of counsellor to the Parliament of Paris, where he afterwards
became president. His sons, each provided with a handsome fortune,
entered the army, and through their marriages became attached to the
court. The Revolution swept the family away; but one old dowager, too
obstinate to emigrate, was left; she was put in prison, threatened with
death, but was saved by the 9th Thermidor and recovered her property.
When the proper time came, about the year 1804, she recalled her
grandson to France. Auguste de Maulincour, the only scion of the
Carbonnon de Maulincour, was brought up by the good dowager with
the triple care of a mother, a woman of rank, and an obstinate dowager.
When the Restoration came, the young man, then eighteen years of age,
entered the Maison-Rouge, followed the princes to Ghent, was made an
officer in the body-guard, left it to serve in the line, but was recalled
later to the Royal Guard, where, at twenty- three years of age, he found
himself major of a cavalry regiment,--a splendid position, due to his
grandmother, who had played her cards well to obtain it, in spite of his
youth. This double biography is a compendium of the general and

special history, barring variations, of all the noble families who
emigrated having debts and property, dowagers and tact.
Madame la Baronne de Maulincour had a friend in the old Vidame de
Pamiers, formerly a commander of the Knights of Malta. This was one
of those undying friendships founded on sexagenary ties which nothing
can weaken, because at the bottom of such intimacies there are certain
secrets of the human heart, delightful to guess at when we have the
time, insipid to explain in twenty words, and which might make the text
of a work in four volumes as amusing as the Doyen de Killerine,-- a
work about which young men talk and judge without having read it.
Auguste de Maulincour belonged therefore to the faubourg
Saint-Germain through his grandmother and the vidame, and it sufficed
him to date back