White Lies | Page 9

That lady sent her
promptly down again with a black-edged note to this effect.
Highly flattered by Monsieur de Riviere's visit, the baroness must
inform him that she receives none but old acquaintances, in the present
grief of the family, and of the KINGDOM.
Young Riviere was cruelly mortified by this rebuff. He went off
hurriedly, grinding his teeth with rage.
"Cursed aristocrats! We have done well to pull you down, and we will
have you lower still. How I despise myself for giving any one the

chance to affront me thus. The haughty old fool; if she had known her
interest, she would have been too glad to make a powerful friend.
These royalists are in a ticklish position; I can tell her that. She calls me
De Riviere; that implies nobody without a 'De' to their name would
have the presumption to visit her old tumble- down house. Well, it is a
lesson; I am a republican, and the Commonwealth trusts and honors me;
yet I am so ungrateful as to go out of the way to be civil to her enemies,
to royalists; as if those worn-out creatures had hearts, as if they could
comprehend the struggle that took place in my mind between duty, and
generosity to the fallen, before I could make the first overture to their
acquaintance; as if they could understand the politeness of the heart, or
anything nobler than curving and ducking and heartless etiquette. This
is the last notice I will ever take of that old woman, unless it is to
denounce her."
He walked home to the town very fast, his heart boiling, and his lips
compressed, and his brow knitted.
To this mood succeeded a sullen and bitter one. He was generous, but
vain, and his love had humiliated him so bitterly, he resolved to tear it
out of his heart. He absented himself from church; he met the young
ladies no more. He struggled fiercely with his passion; he went about
dogged, silent, and sighing. Presently he devoted his leisure hours to
shooting partridges instead of ladies. And he was right; partridges
cannot shoot back; whereas beautiful women, like Cupid, are all
archers more or less, and often with one arrow from eye or lip do more
execution than they have suffered from several discharges of our small
shot.
In these excursions, Edouard was generally accompanied by a thick- set
rustic called Dard, who, I believe, purposes to reveal his own character
to you, and so save me that trouble.
One fine afternoon, about four o'clock, this pair burst remorselessly
through a fence, and landed in the road opposite Bigot's Auberge; a
long low house, with "ICI ON LOGE A PIED ET A CHEVAL,"
written all across it in gigantic letters. Riviere was for moving
homeward, but Dard halted and complained dismally of "the soldier's
gripes." The statesman had never heard of that complaint, so Dard
explained that the VULGAR name for it was hunger. "And only smell,"
said he, "the soup is just fit to come off the fire."

Riviere smiled sadly, but consented to deign to eat a morsel in the
porch. Thereat Dard dashed wildly into the kitchen.
They dined at one little round table, each after his fashion. When Dard
could eat no more, he proceeded to drink; and to talk in proportion.
Riviere, lost in his own thoughts, attended to him as men of business do
to a babbling brook; until suddenly from the mass of twaddle broke
forth a magic word--Beaurepaire; then the languid lover pricked up his
ears and found Mr. Dard was abusing that noble family right and left.
Young Riviere inquired what ground of offence they had given HIM.
"I'll tell you," said Dard; "they impose on Jacintha; and so she imposes
on me." Then observing he had at last gained his employer's ear, he
became prodigiously loquacious, as such people generally are when
once they get upon their own griefs.
"These Beaurepaire aristocrats," said he, with his hard peasant
good-sense, "are neither the one thing nor the other; they cannot keep
up nobility, they have not the means; they will not come down off their
perch, they have not the sense. No, for as small as they are, they must
look and talk as big as ever. They can only afford one servant, and I
don't believe they pay her; but they must be attended on just as
obsequious as when they had a dozen. And this is fatal to all us little
people that have the misfortune to be connected with them."
"Why, how are you connected with them?"
"By the tie of affection."
"I thought you hated them."
"Of course I do; but I have the ill-luck to love Jacintha, and she loves
these aristocrats, and makes me