Chapter VI: Masters and Slaves (2)

We commend to “Father Gavazzi,” and to the Rev. Doctors Sunderland and Newman of Washington, who are ever ready to throw down the gauntlet when an argument is made to prove that S. Peter was at Rome, the language of the logical and laborious Macknight, who clearly expresses our own view, and whose diligence, learning, and moderation were so fully appreciated by Bishop Tomline: “It is not for our honor nor for our interest, either as Christians or Protestants, to deny the truth of events ascertained by early and well‐attested tradition. If any make an ill use of such facts, we are not accountable for it. We are not, from a dread of such abuses, to overthrow the credit of all history, the consequences of which would be fatal.”(25)

Number Thirteen. An Episode Of The Commune.

Mlle. de Lemaque and her sister Mme. de Chanoir lived at No. 13 Rue Royale. They were the daughters of a military man whose fortune when he married consisted in his sword, nothing else; and of a noble Demoiselle de Cambatte, whose wedding portion, according to the good old French fashion, was precisely the same as her husband’s, minus the sword. But over and above this joint capital the young people had a good stock of hope and courage, and an inexhaustible fund of love; they had therefore as good a chance of getting on as other young folk who start in life under the same pecuniary disadvantages. M. de Lemaque, moreover, had friends in high place who looked kindly on him, and promised him countenance and protection, and there was no reason, as far as he and his wife could see, why he should not in due time clutch that legendary baton which Napoleon declared every French soldier carries in his knapsack. Nor, indeed, looking at things from a retrospective point of view, was there any reason, that we can see, why he should not have died a marshal of France, except that he died too soon. The young soldier was in a fair way of climbing to the topmost rung of the military ladder; but just as he had got his foot on the third rung, Death stepped down and met him, and he climbed no further. His wife followed him into the grave three years later. They left two daughters, Félicité and Aline, the only fruits of their short and happy union. The orphans were educated at the Legion of Honor, and then sent adrift on the wide, wide world, to battle with its winds and waves, to sink or swim as best they could. They swam. Perhaps I ought rather say they floated. The eldest, Félicité, was married from S. Denis to an old general, who, after a reasonably short time, had the delicacy to betake himself to a better world, leaving his gay wife a widow at the head of an income of £40 a year. Aline might have married under similar circumstances, but, after turning it over in her mind, she came to the conclusion that, all things considered, since it was a choice of evils, and that she must earn her bread in some way, she preferred earning it and eating it independently as a single woman. This gave rise to the only quarrel the sisters had had in their lives. Félicité resented the disgrace that Aline was going to put on the family name by degenerating into a giver of private lessons, when she might have secured forty pounds a year for ever by a few years’ dutiful attendance on a brave man who had fought his country’s battles.

“Well, if you can find me a warrior of ninety,” said the younger sister, a month before she left S. Denis, “I’m not sure that he might not persuade me; but I never will capitulate under ninety; I couldn’t trust a man under that; they live for ever when they marry between sixty and eighty, and there are no tyrants like them; now, I would do my duty as a kind wife for a year or so, but I’ve no notion of taking a situation as nurse for fifteen or twenty years, and that’s what one gets by marrying a young man of seventy or thereabouts.”

Félicité urged her own case as a proof to the contrary. Général de Chanoir was only sixty‐eight when she married him, and he retired at seventy. Aline maintained, however, that this was the one exception necessary to prove the rule to the present generation, and as no eligible _parti_ of fourscore and ten presented itself before she left school, she held to her resolve, and started at once as a teacher.

The sisters took an apartment together, if two rooms, a cabinet de toilette, and a cooking‐range in a dark passage, dignified by the name of kitchen, can be called an apartment, and for six years they lived very happily.

Mme. de Chanoir was small and fair, and very distinguished‐looking. She had never known a day’s illness in her life, but she was a hypochondriac. She believed herself afflicted with a spine disease, which necessitated reclining all day long on the sofa in a Louis Quinze dressing‐gown and a Dubarry cap.

Aline was tall and dark, not exactly pretty, but indescribably piquant. Without being delicate, her health was far less robust than her sister’s; but she was blessed with indomitable spirits and a fund of energy that carried her through a variety of aches and pains, and often bore her successfully through her round of daily work when another would have given in.

The domestic establishment of the sisters consisted in a charwoman, who rejoiced in the name of Mme. Cléry. She was a type of a class almost extinct in Paris now; a dainty little cook, clean as a sixpence, honest as the sun, orderly as a clock, a capital servant in every way. She came twice a day to No. 13, two hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, and the sisters paid her twenty francs a month. She might have struck for more wages, and rather than let her go they would have managed to raise them; but Mme. Cléry was born before strikes came into fashion, it was quite impossible to say how long before; her age was incalculable; her youth belonged to that class of facts spoken of as beyond the memory of the oldest man in the district. Aline used to look at her sometimes, and wonder if she really could have been born, and if she meant to die like other people; the crisp, wiry old woman looked the sort of person never to have either a beginning or an end; they had had her now for eight years—at least Mme. de Chanoir had—and there was not the shadow of a change in her. Her gowns were like herself, they never wore out, neither did her caps—high Normandy caps, with flaps extended like a wind‐mill in repose, stiff, white, and uncompromising. Everything about her was antiquated. She had a religious regard for antiquity in every shape, and a proportionate contempt for modernism; but, of all earthly things, what her soul loved most was an old name, and what it most despised a new one. She used to say that if she chose to cook the _rotis_ of a parvenu she might make double the money, and it was true; but she could not bend her spirit to it; she liked her dry bread and herbs better from a good family than a stalled ox from upstarts. She was as faithful as a dog to her two mistresses, and consequently lorded over them like a step‐mother, perpetually bullying and scolding, and bewailing her own infatuation in staying with them while she might be turning a fatter pullet on her own spit at home than the miserable _coquille_ at No. 13 ever held a fire to. Why had she not the sense to take the situation that M. X——, the _agent de change_, across the street, had offered her again and again? The _femme de ménage_ was, in fact, as odious and exasperating as the most devoted old servant who ever nursed a family from the cradle to the grave. But let any one else dare so much as cast a disrespectful glance at either of her victims! She shook her fist at the _concierge’s_ wife one day for venturing to call Mme. de Chanoir Mme. de Chanoir _tout court_, instead of Mme. la Générale de Chanoir, to a flunky who came with a note, and she boxed the _concierge’s_ ears for speaking of Aline as “l’Institutrice.” As Mme. la Générale’s sofa was drawn across the window that looked into the court, she happened to be an eye‐witness to the two incidents, and heard every word that was said. This accidental disclosure of Mme. Cléry’s regard for the family dignity before outsiders covered a multitude of sins in the eyes of both the sisters. Indeed, Mme. de Chanoir came at last, by force of habit, almost to enjoy being bullied by the old soul. “_Cela nous pose, ma chère_,” she would remark complacently, when the wind from the kitchen blew due north, and Aline threatened to mutiny.

Aline never could have endured it if she had been as constantly tried as her easy‐going sister was; but, lucky for all parties, she went out immediately after breakfast, and seldom came in till late in the afternoon, when the old beldame was busy getting ready the dinner.

It was a momentous life they led, the two young women, but, on the whole, it was a happy one. Mme. de Chanoir, seeing how bravely her sister carried the burden she had taken up, grew reconciled to it in time. They had a pleasant little society, too; friends who had known them from their childhood, some rich and in good positions, others struggling like themselves in a narrow cage and under difficult circumstances; but one and all liked the sisters, and brought a little contingent of sunshine to their lives. As to Aline, she had sunshine enough in herself to light up the whole Rue Royale. Every lesson she gave, every incident of the day, no matter how trivial, fell across her path like a sunbeam; she had a knack of looking at things from a sunny focus that shot out rays on every object that came within its radius, and of extracting amusement or interest from the most commonplace things and people; even her own vexations she had turned into ridicule. Her position of governess was a fountain of fun to her. When another would have drawn gall from a snub, and smarted and been miserable under a slight, Aline de Lemaque saw a comic side to the circumstance, and would dress it up in a fashion that diverted herself and her friends for a week. Moreover, the young lady was something of a philosopher.

“You never find out human nature till you come to earn your own bread—I mean, women don’t,” she used to say to Mme. de Chanoir. “If I were the mother of a family of daughters, and wanted to teach them life, I’d make every one of them, no matter how big their _dots_ were, begin by running after the _cachet_. Nobody who hasn’t tried it would believe what a castle of truth it is to one—a mirror that shows up character to the life, a sort of moral photography. It is often as good as a play to me to watch the change that comes over people when, after talking to them, and making myself pass for a very agreeable person, I suddenly announce the fact that I give lessons. Their whole countenance changes, not that they look on me straightway with contempt. Oh! dear no. Many good Christians, people of the ’help yourself and God will help you’ sect, conceive, on the contrary, a great respect for me; but I become metamorphosed on the spot. I am not what they took me for, they took me for a lady, and all the time I was a governess! They did not think the less of me, but they can’t help feeling that they have been taken in; that, in fact, I’m an altogether different variety from themselves, and it is very odd they did not recognize it at first sight. But these are the least exciting experiences. The great fun is when I get hold of an out‐and‐out worldly individual, man or woman, but a woman is best, and let them go on till they have thoroughly committed themselves, made themselves gushingly agreeable to me, perhaps gone the length of asking, in a significant manner, if I live in their neighborhood; then comes the crisis. I smile my gladdest, and say, ‘Monsieur, or Madame, I give lessons!’ _Changement de décoration à vue d’œil, ma chère._ It’s just as if I _lancéd_ an _obus_ into the middle of the company, only it rebounds on me and hits nobody else; the eyebrows of the company go up, the corners of its mouth go down, and it bows to me as I sit on the ruins of my respectability, shattered to pieces by my own _obus_.”

“I can’t understand how you can laugh at it. If I were in your place, I should have died of vexation and wounded pride long ago,” said Mme. de Chanoir, one day, as Aline related in high glee an obus episode that she had had that morning; “but I really believe you have no feeling.”

“Well, whatever I have, I keep out of the reach of vulgar impertinence. I should be very sorry to make my feelings a target for insolence and bad breeding,” replied Aline pertly. This was the simple truth. Her feelings were out of the reach of such petty shafts; they were cased in cheerfulness and common sense, and a nobler sort of pride than that in which Mme. de Chanoir considered her sister wanting. If, however, the obus was frequently fatal to Mlle. de Lemaque’s social standing, on the other hand it occasionally did her good service; but of this later. Its present character was that of an explosive bomb which she carried in her pocket, and _lancéd_ with infinite gusto on every available opportunity.

On Saturday evening the sisters were “at home.” These little soirées were the great event of their quiet lives. All the episodes and anecdotes of the week were treasured up for that evening, when the intimes came to see them and converse and sip a glass of cold _eau sucrée_ in summer, and a cup of hot ditto in winter (but then it was called tea) by the light of a small lamp with a green shade. There was no attempt at entertainment or finery of any kind, except that Mme. Cléry, instead of going home as soon as the dinner things were washed up, stayed to open the door. It was a remnant of the sort of society that used to exist in French families some thirty years ago, when conversation was cultivated as the primary accomplishment of men and women, and when they met regularly to exercise themselves in the difficult and delightful art. It was not reserved to the well‐born exclusively to talk well and brilliantly in those days, when the most coveted encomium that could be passed on any one was, “He talks well.” All classes vied for it; every circle had its centre of conversation. The _fauteuil de l’aïeule_ and the salon of the _femme d’esprit_, each had its audience, attended as assiduously, and perhaps enjoyed quite as much, as the vaudevilles and ambigus that have since drawn away the bourgeois from the one and the man of fashion from the other. Besides its usual habitués for conversation, every circle had one habitué who was looked upon as the friend of the family, and tacitly took precedence of all the others. The friend of the family at No. 13 was a certain professor of the Sorbonne named M. Dalibouze. He was somewhere on the sunny side of fifty, a bald, pompous little man who wore spectacles, took snuff, and laid down the law; very prosy and very estimable, a model professor. He had never married, but it was the dream of his life to marry. He had meditated on marriage for the last thirty years, and of course knew more about it than any man who had been married double that time. He was never so eloquent or so emphatic as when dilating on the joys and duties of domestic life; no matter how tired he was with study and scientific researches, how disappointed in the result of some cherished literary scheme, he brightened up the moment marriage came on the tapis. This hobby of the professor’s was a great amusement to Mme. de Chanoir, who delighted to see him jump into the saddle and ride off at a canter while she lay languidly working at her tapestry, patting him on the back every now and then, by a word of encouragement, or signifying her assent merely by a smile or a nod. Sometimes she would take him to task seriously about putting his theories into practice and getting himself a wife, assuring him that it was quite wicked of him not to marry when he was so richly endowed with all the qualities necessary to make a model husband.

“Ah! madame, if I thought I were capable of making a young woman happy!” M. Dalibouze would exclaim with a sigh; “but at my age! No, I have let my chance go by.”

“How, sir, at your age!” the générale would protest. “Why, it is the very flower of manhood, the moment of all others for a man to marry. You have outlived the delusions of youth and none of its vigor; you have crossed the Rubicon that separates folly from wisdom, and you have left nothing on the other side of the bridge but the silly chimera of boyhood. Believe me, the woman whom you would select would never wish to see you a day younger.”

And M. Dalibouze would caress his chin, and observe thoughtfully: “Do you think so, madame?” Upon which Mme. de Chanoir would pour another vial of oil and honey on the learned head of the professor, till the wonder was that it did not turn on his shoulders.

Aline had no sympathy with his rhapsodies or his jeremiads; they bored her to extinction, and sometimes it was all she could do not to tell him so; but she disapproved of his being made a joke of, and testified against it very decidedly when Félicité, in a spirit of mischief, led him up to a more than usually ridiculous culmination. It was not fair, she said, to make a greater fool of the good little man than he made of himself, and instead of encouraging him to talk such nonsense one ought to laugh him out of it, and try and cure him of his silly conceit.

“I don’t see it at all in that light,” Mme. de Chanoir would answer. “In the first place, if I laughed at him, or rather if I let him see that I did, he would never forgive me, and, as I have a great regard for him, I should be sorry to lose his friendship; and in the next place, it’s a great amusement to me to see him swallow my little doses of flattery so complacently, and I have no scruple in dosing him, because nothing that I or any one else could say could possibly add one grain to his self‐ conceit, so one may as well turn it to account for a little entertainment.”

It was partly this system of flattery, which Aline resented on principle, that induced her occasionally to snub the professor, and partly the fact that she had reason to suspect his dreams of married bliss centred upon herself. In fact, she knew it. He had never told her so outright, for the simple reason that, whenever he drew near that crisis, Aline cut him short in such a peremptory manner that it cowed him for weeks, but nevertheless she knew in her heart of hearts that she reigned supreme over M. Dalibouze’s. She would not have married him, no, not if he could have crowned her queen of the Sorbonne and the Collége de France, but the fact of his being her slave and aspiring to be her master constituted a claim on her regard which a true‐hearted woman seldom disowns.

Félicité would have favored his suit if there had been the ghost of a chance for him, but she knew there was not.

Mme. Cléry looked coldly on it. Needless to say, neither M. Dalibouze nor his cruel‐hearted lady‐love had ever made a confidante of the _femme de ménage_; but she often remarked to her mistresses when they ventured an opinion on anything connected with her special department, “Je ne suis pas née d’hier,” an assertion which, strange to say, even the rebellious Aline had never attempted to gainsay. Mme. Cléry was not, indeed, born yesterday, moreover she was a Frenchwoman, and a particularly wide‐awake one, and from the first evening that she saw Aline sugaring M. Dalibouze’s tea, dropping in lump after lump in that reckless way, while the little man held his cup and beamed at her through his spectacles as if he meant to stand there for ever simpering, “Merci encore!”—it occurred to Mme. Cléry when she saw this that there was more in it than tea‐making. Of course it was natural and proper that a young woman, especially an orphan, should think of getting married, but it was right and proper that her friends should think of it too, and see that she married the proper person. Now, on the face of it, M. Dalibouze could not be the proper person. Nevertheless, Mme. Cléry waited till the suspicion that M. Dalibouze had settled it in his own mind that he was that man took the shape of a conviction before she considered it her duty to interfere.

By interfering Mme. Cléry meant going _aux renseignements_. Nobody ever got true _renseignements_, especially when there was a marriage in question, except people like her; ladies and gentlemen never get behind the scenes with each other, or, if they do, they never tell what they see there. They are very sweet and smiling when they meet in the salon, and nobody guesses that madame has rated her _femme de chambre_ for not putting the flowers in her hair exactly to her fancy, or that monsieur has flung a boot at his valet for giving him his shaving‐water too hot or too cold. If you want the truth, you must get it by the back‐stairs. This was Mme. Cléry’s belief, and, acting upon it, she went to M. Dalibouze’s _concierge_ in the Rue Jean Beauvais to consult him confidentially about his _locataire_.

The first thing to be ascertained before entering on such secondary details as character, conduct, etc., was whether or not the professor was of a good enough family to be entertained at all as a husband for Mlle. de Lemaque. On this _sine qua non_ question the _concierge_ could unfortunately throw no light. The professor had a multitude of friends, all respectable people, many of them _décorés_, who drove to the door in spruce _coupés_, but of his family Pipelet knew nothing; of his personal respectability there was no doubt whatever; he was the kindest of men, a very pearl of tenants, always in before midnight, and gave forty francs to Pipelet on New Year’s day, not to count sundry other little bonuses on minor _fêtes_ during the year. But so long as her mind was in darkness on the main point, all this was no better than sounding brass in the ears of Mme. Cléry.

“Has he, or has he not, the _particule_?” she demanded, cutting Pipelet short in the middle of his panegyric.

“The _particule_?” repeated Pipelet. “What’s that?”

“The _particule nobiliaire_,” explained Mme. Cléry, with a touch of contempt. “There is some question of a marriage between him and one of my ladies; but, if M. Dalibouze hasn’t got the _particule_, it’s no use thinking of it.”

“Madame,” said Pipelet, assuming a meditative air—he was completely at sea as to what this essential piece of property might be, but did not like to own his ignorance—“I’m not a man to set up for knowing more of my tenant’s business than I do, and M. Dalibouze has never opened himself to me about how or where his money was placed; but I could give you the name of his agent, if I thought it would not compromise me.”

“I’m not a woman to compromise any one that showed me confidence,” said Mme. Cléry, tightening her lips, and bobbing her flaps at Pipelet; “but you need not give me the name of his agent. What sort of a figure should I make at his agent’s! Give me his own name. How does he spell it?”

“Spell it!” echoed Pipelet.

“A big _D_ or a little _d_?” said Mme. Cléry.

“Why, a big _D_, of course! Who ever spelt their name with a little one?” retorted Pipelet.

“Ah!...” Mme. Cléry smiled a smile of serene pity on the benighted ignoramus, and then observed coolly: “I suspected it! I’m not easy to deceive in that sort of things. I was not born yesterday. Good‐morning, M. le Concierge.” She moved towards the door.

“Stop!” cried Pipelet, seizing his berette as if a ray of light had shot through his skull—“stop! Now that I think of it, it’s a little _d_. I have not a doubt but it’s a little _d_. I noticed it only yesterday on a letter that came for monsieur, and I said to myself: ‘Let us see!’ I said. ‘What a queer fancy for a man of distinction like M. le Professeur to spell his name with a little _d_!’ Là! if I didn’t say those words to myself no later than yesterday!”

Mme. Cléry was dubious. Unluckily there was no letter in M. Dalibouze’s box at that moment, which would have settled the point at issue, so she had nothing for it but to go home, and turn it in her mind what was to be done next. After all, it was a great responsibility on her. The old soul considered herself in the light of a protector to the two young women, one a cripple on the broad of her back, and the other a light‐hearted creature who believed everything and everybody. It was her place to look after them as far as she could. That afternoon, when Mme. Cléry went to No. 13, after her fruitless expedition to the Rue Jean Beauvais, she took a letter in to Mme. de Chanoir. She had never seen, or, at any rate, never noticed, the writing before, but as she handed the envelope to her mistress it flashed upon her that it was from M. Dalibouze, and that it bore on the subject of her morning’s peregrination.

She seized a feather‐broom that hung by the fireplace, and began vigorously threatening the clock and the candlesticks, as an excuse for staying in the room, and watching Mme. de Chanoir in the looking‐glass while she read the letter. The old woman was an irascible enemy to dust; they were used to see her at the most inopportune times pounce on the feather‐broom and begin whipping about her to the right and left, so Mme. de Chanoir took no notice of this sudden castigation of the chimney‐piece at four o’clock in the afternoon. She read her note, and then, tossing it into the basket beside her, resumed her tapestry as if nothing had occurred to divert her thoughts from roses and Berlin wool.

“Mme. la Générale, pardon and excuse,” said Mme. Cléry, deliberately hanging the feather‐broom on its nail, and going up to the foot of the générale’s sofa. “I have it on my mind to ask something of madame.”

“Ask it, my good Mme. Cléry.”

“Does Mme. la Générale think of marrying Mlle. Aline?”

Mme. de Chanoir opened her eyes, and stared for a moment in mild surprise at her charwoman, then a smile broke over her face, and she said:

“You are thinking that you would not like to come to me if I were alone?”

“I was not thinking of that, madame,” replied Mme. Cléry, in a tone of ceremony that was not habitual, and which would have boded no good (Mme. Cléry was never so respectful as when she was going to be particularly disagreeable), except that she looked very meek, and, Félicité thought, rather affectionately at her as their eyes met.

“Well,” said Mme. de Chanoir, “I suppose we must marry her some day; I ought, perhaps, to occupy myself about it more actively than I do; but there’s time enough to think about it yet; mademoiselle is in no hurry.”

“Dame!” said Mme. Cléry testily, “when a demoiselle has become an old maid, there is not so much time to lose! Pardon and excuse, Mme. la Générale, but I thought, I don’t know why, that that letter had something to do with it?”

“This letter! What could have put that into your head?”

Mme. de Chanoir took up the note to see if the envelope had anything about it which warranted this romantic suspicion, but it was an ordinary envelope, with no trace of anything more peculiar than the post‐mark.

“As I have told Mme. la Générale before,” said Mme. Cléry, shaking her head significantly, “I was not born yesterday”—she emphasized the _not_ as if Mme. de Chanoir had denied that fact and challenged her to swear to it on the Bible—“and I don’t carry my eyes in my pocket; and when a demoiselle heaps lumps of sugar into a gentleman’s cup till it’s as thick as honey for a spoon to stand in, and a shame to see the substance of the family wasted in such a way, and she never grudging it a bit, but looking as if it would be fun to her to turn the sugar‐bowl upside down over it—I say, when I see that sort of thing, I’m not femme Cléry if there isn’t something in it.”

Félicité felt inclined to laugh, but she restrained herself, and observed interrogatively:

“Well, Mme. Cléry, suppose there is?”

This extravagance of sugar on M. Dalibouze was an old grievance of Mme. Cléry’s. In fact, it had been her only one against the professor, till she grew to look upon him as the possible husband of Mlle. Aline, and then the question of his having or not having the _particule_ assumed such alarming importance in her mind that it magnified all minor defects, and she believed him capable of every misdemeanor under the sun.

“Mme. la Générale,” she replied, “one does not marry every day; one ought to think seriously about it; Mlle. Aline has not experience; she is _vive_ and light‐hearted; she is a person to be taken in by outward appearances; such things as learning, good principles, and _esprit_ would blind her to serious shortcomings; it is the duty of Mme. la Générale to prevent such a mistake in time.”

“What sort of shortcomings are you afraid of in M. Dalibouze, Mme. Cléry?” inquired Mme. de Chanoir, dropping her tapestry, and looking with awakened curiosity at the old woman.

“Let us begin with a first principle, Mme. la Générale,” observed Mme. Cléry, demurely slapping the palm of her left hand. “Mlle. Aline is _née_; the father and mother of mamzelle were both of an excellent family; it is consequently of the first necessity that her husband should be so, too; the first thing, therefore, to be considered in a suitor is his name. Now, has M. Dalibouze the _particule_, or has he not?”

It was a very great effort for Mme. de Chanoir to keep her countenance under this charge and deliver with which the old woman solemnly closed her speech, and then stood awaiting the effect on her listener; still, such is the weakness of human nature, the générale in her inmost heart was flattered by it; it was pleasant to be looked up to as belonging to a race above the common herd, to be recognized in spite of her poverty, even by a _femme de ménage_, as superior to the wealthy parvenus whose fathers and mothers were not of a good family.

“My good Mme. Cléry,” she said after a moment’s reflection, “you, like ourselves, were brought up with very different ideas from those that people hold nowadays. Nobody cares a straw to‐day who a man’s father was, or whether he had the _particule_ or not; all that they care about is that he should be well educated, and well conducted, and well off; and, my dear, one must go with the times, one must give in to the force of public opinion around one. Customs change with the times. I would, of course, much rather have a brother‐in‐law of our own rank than one cleverer and richer who was not; but what would you have? One cannot have everything. It is not pleasant for me to see Mlle. de Lemaque earning her own bread, running about the streets like a milliner’s apprentice at all hours of the day. I would overlook something to see her married to a kind, honorable man who would keep her in comfort and independence.”

“_Bonté divine!_” exclaimed Mme. Cléry, with a look of deep distress and consternation, “madame would then actually marry mamzelle to a _bourgeois sans particule_? For madame admits that M. Dalibouze has not the _particule_, that he spells his name with a big _D_?”

“Alas! he does,” confessed the générale; “but he comes, nevertheless, of a good old Normandy stock, Mme. Cléry; his great‐grandfather was _procureur du roi_ under—”

“Tut! tut!” interrupted Mme. Cléry; “his great‐grandfather may have been what he liked; if he wasn’t a gentleman, he has no business marrying his great grandson to a de Lemaque. No, madame; I am a poor woman, but I know better than that. Mamzelle’s father would turn in his grave if he saw her married to a man who spelt his name with a big _D_.”

The conversation was interrupted by a ring at the door. It was Aline. She came back earlier than usual, because one of her pupils was ill and had not been able to take her lesson. The young girl was flushed and excited, and flung herself into an arm‐chair the moment she entered, and burst into tears. Mme. de Chanoir sat up in alarm, fearing she was ill, and suggested a cup of _tisane_.

“Oh! ’tis nothing. I’m an idiot to mind it or let such impertinence vex me,” she said, when the first outburst had passed off and relieved her.

“_Mon Dieu!_ but what vexes mamzelle?” inquired Mme. Cléry anxiously.

“A horrid man that followed me the length of the street, and made some impudent speech, and asked me where I lived,” sobbed Aline.

“Is it possible!” exclaimed the old woman, aghast, and clasping her hands. “Well, mamzelle does astonish me! I thought young men knew better nowadays than to go on with that sort of tricks; fifty years ago they used to. I remember how I was followed and spoken to every time I went to church or to market; it was a persecution; but now I come and go and nobody minds me. To think of their daring to speak to mamzelle!”

“That’s what one must expect when one walks about alone at your age, _ma pauvre_ Aline,” said the générale, rather sharply, with a significant look at Mme. Cléry which that good lady understood, and resented by compressing her lips and bobbing her flaps, as much as to say, “One has a principle or one has not”—principle being in this instance synonymous with _particule_.

Things remained _in statu quo_ after this for some years. Mme. de Chanoir did not enlighten her sister on the subject of the conference with Mme. Cléry, but she worked as far as she could in favor of the luckless suitor who spelt his name with a capital _D_. It was of no use, however. Aline continued to snub him so pertinaciously and persistently that Mme. de Chanoir at last gave up his cause as hopeless, and the professor himself, when he saw this, his solitary stronghold, surrender, thought it best to raise the siege with a good grace, and make a friendly truce with the victor. He frankly withdrew from the field of suitors, and took up his position as a friend of the family. This once done, he accepted its responsibilities and prerogatives, and held himself on the _qui vive_ to render any service in his power to Mme. de Chanoir; he kept her _concierge_ in order, and brought bonbons and flowers to No. 13 on every possible occasion. He knew Aline was passionately fond of the latter, and he was careful to keep the flower stand that stood in the pier of the little salon freshly supplied with her favorite plants, and the vases filled with her favorite flowers. He never dared to offer her a present, but under cover of offering them to the générale he kept her informed about every new book which was likely to interest her. Finally, Frenchman‐ like, having abandoned the hope of marrying her himself, he set to work to find some more fortunate suitor. This was _par excellence_ the duty of a friend of the family, and M. Dalibouze was fully alive to its importance. The disinterested zeal he displayed in the discharge of it would have been comical if the spirit of genuine self‐sacrifice which animated him had not touched it with pathos. One by one every eligible _parti_ in the range of his acquaintance was led up for inspection to No. 13. Mme. de Chanoir entered complacently into the presentations; they amused her, and she tried to persuade herself that, sooner or later, something would come of them; but she knew Aline too well ever to let her into the secret of the professor’s matrimonial manœuvres. The result would have been to furnish Mlle. de Lemaque with an _obus_ opportunity and nothing more.

But do what she would, the générale could never cheat Mme. Cléry. The old woman detected a _prétendant_ as a cat does a mouse. It was an instinct with her. There was no putting her off the scent. She never said a word to Mme. de Chanoir, but she had a most aggravating way of making her understand tacitly that she knew all about it—that, in fact, she was not born yesterday. This was her system, whenever M. Dalibouze brought a _parti_ to tea in the evening. Mme. Cléry was seized next day with a furious dusting fit, and when the générale testified against the feathers that kept flying out of the broom, Mme. Cléry would observe, in a significant way:

“Mme. la Générale, that makes an impression when one sees a salon well dusted; that proves that the servant is capable—that she attends to her work. Madame does not think of those things, but strangers do.”

It became at length a sort of cabalistic ceremony with the old woman; intelligible only to Mme. de Chanoir. If Aline came in when the fit was on her, and ventured to expostulate, and ask what she was doing with the duster at that time of day, Mme. Cléry would remark stiffly: “Mamzelle Aline, I am dusting.” Aline came at last to believe that it was a modified phase of S. Vitus’ dance, and that for want of anything better the old beldame vented her nerves on imaginary dust which she pursued in holes and corners with her feathery weapon.

This went on till Mlle. de Lemaque was six‐and‐twenty. She was still a bright, brave creature, working hard, accepting the privations and toil of her life in a spirit of sunshiny courage. But the sun was no longer always shining. There were days now when he drew behind a cloud—when toil pressed like a burden, and she beat her wings against it, and hated the cage that cooped her in; and she longed not so much for rest or happiness as for freedom—for a larger scope and higher aims, and wider, fuller sympathies. When these cloudy days came around, Aline felt the void of her life with an intensity that amounted at times to anguish; she felt it all the more keenly because she could not speak of it. Mme. de Chanoir would not have understood it. The sisters were sincerely attached to each other, but there was little sympathy of character between them, and on many points they were as little acquainted with each other as the neighbors on the next street. They knew this, and agreed sensibly to keep clear of certain subjects on which they could never meet except to disagree. The younger sister, therefore, when the sky was overcast, and when her spirits flagged, never tried to lean upon the older, but worked against the enemy in silence, denying herself the luxury of complaint. If her looks betrayed her, as was sometimes the case, and prompted Mme. de Chanoir to inquire if there was anything the matter beyond the never‐ending annoyance of life in general, Aline’s assurance that there was not was invariably followed by the remark: “_Ma sœur_, I wish you were married.” To which Aline as invariably replied: “I am happier as I am, Félicité.” It was true, or at any rate Mlle. de Lemaque thought it was. Under all her surface indifference she carried a true woman’s heart. She had dreamt her dreams of happiness, of tender fireside joys, and the dream was so fair and beautiful that for years it filled her life like a reality, and when she discovered, or fancied she did, that it was all too beautiful to be anything but a dream, that the hero of her young imagination would never cross her path in the form of a mortal husband, Aline accepted the discovery with a sigh, but without repining, and laid aside all thought of marriage as a guest that was not for her. As to the marriages that she saw every day around her, she would no more have bound herself in one of them than she would have sold herself to an Eastern pasha. Marriage was a very different thing in her eyes from what it was in Mme. de Chanoir’s. There was no point on which the sisters were more asunder than on this, and Aline understood it so well that she avoided touching on it except in jest. Whenever the subject was introduced, she drew a mask of frivolity over her real feelings to avoid bringing down the générale’s ridicule on what she would stigmatize as preposterous sentimentality.

M. Dalibouze alone guessed something of this under‐current of deep feeling in the young girl’s character. With the subtle instinct of affection he penetrated the disguise in which she wrapped herself, but, with a delicacy that she scarcely gave him credit for, he never let her see that he did. Sometimes, indeed, when one of those fits of _tristesse_ was upon her, and she was striving to dissemble it by increased cheerfulness towards everybody, and sauciness towards him, the professor would adapt the conversation to the tone of her thoughts with a skill and apropos that surprised her. Once in particular Aline was startled by the way in which he betrayed either a singularly close observation of her character, or a still more singular sympathy with its moods and sufferings. It was on a Saturday evening, the little circle was gathered round the fire, and the conversation fell upon poetry and the mission of poets amongst common men. Aline declared that it was the grandest of all missions; that, after the prophet and priest, the poet did more for the moral well‐being, the spiritual redemption of his fellows than any other missionary, whether philosopher, artist, or patriot; he combined them all, in fact, if he wished it. If he was a patriot, he could serve his country better than a soldier, by singing her wrongs and her glories, and firing the souls of her sons, and making all mankind vibrate to the touch of pain, or joy, or passionate revenge, while he sat quietly by his own hearth; she quoted Moore and Krazinski, and other patriot bards who living had ruled their people, and sent down their name a legacy of glory to unborn generations, till warmed by her subject she grew almost eloquent, and broke off in an impulsive cry of admiration and envy: “Oh! what a glorious privilege to be a poet, to be even a man with the power of doing something, of living a noble life, instead of being a weak, good‐for‐nothing woman!”

The little ring of listeners heard her with pleasure, and thought she must have a very keen appreciation of the beauties of the poets to speak of them so well and so fervently. But M. Dalibouze saw more in it than this. He saw an under‐tone of impatience, of disappointment, of longing to go and do likewise, to spread her wings and fly, to wield a wand that had power to make others spread their wings; there was a spirit’s war‐cry in it, a rebel’s impotent cry against the narrow, inexorable bondage of her life.

“Yes,” said the professor, “it is a grand mission, I grant you, but it is not such a rare one as you make it out, Mlle. Aline. There are more poets in the world than those who write poetry; few of us have the gift of being poets in language, but we may all be poets in action if we will; we may live out our lives in poems.”

“If we had the fashioning of our lives, no doubt we might,” asserted Aline ironically; “but they are most of them so shabby that I defy Homer himself to manufacture an epic or an idyl out of them.”

“You are mistaken. There is no life too shabby to be a poem,” said M. Dalibouze; “it is true, we can’t fashion our lives as you say, but we can color them, we can harmonize them; but we must begin by believing this, and by getting our elements under command; we must sort them and arrange them, just as Mme. la Générale is doing with the shreds and silks for the tapestry, and then go on patiently working out the pattern leaf by leaf; by‐and‐by when the web gets tangled as it is sure to do with the best workers, instead of pulling angrily at it, or cutting it with the sharp scissors of revolt, we must call up a soft breeze from the land of souls where the spirit of the true poet dwells, and bid it blow over it, and then let us listen, and we shall hear the spirit‐wind draw tones of music out of our tangled web, like the breeze sweeping the strings of an Æolian harp. It is our own fault, or perhaps oftener our own misfortune, if our lives look shabby to us; we consider them piecemeal instead of looking at them as a whole.”

“But how can we look at them as a whole?” said Aline. “We don’t even know that they ever will develop into a whole. How many of us remain on the easel a sort of washed‐in sketch to the end? It seems to me we are pretty much like apples in an orchard; some drop off in the flower, some when they are grown to little green balls, hard and sour and good for nothing; it is only a little of the tree that comes to maturity.”

“And is there not abundance of poetry in every phase of the apple’s life, no matter when it falls?” said M. Dalibouze. “How many poems has the blight of the starry blossom given birth to? And the little green ball, who will count the odes that the school‐boy has sung to it, not in good hexameters perhaps, but in sound, heart poetry, full of zest and the gusto of youth, when all bitters are sweet? O mon Dieu! when I think of the days when a bright‐green apple was like honey in my mouth, I could be a poet myself! No _paté de foie gras_ ever tasted half so sweet as that forbidden fruit of my school‐days!”

“Good for the forbidden fruit!” said Aline, amused at the professor’s sentiment over the reminiscence; “but that is only one view of the question: if the apples could speak, they would give us another.”

“Would they?” said M. Dalibouze. “I’m not sure of that. If the apples discuss the point at all, believe me, they are agreed that whatever befalls them is the very best thing that could. We have no evidence of any created thing, vegetable, mineral, or animal, grumbling at its lot; that is reserved to man, discontent is man’s prerogative, he quarrels with himself, with his destiny, his neighbors, everything by turns. If we could but do like the apples, blossom, and grow, and fall, early or late, just as the wind and the gardener wished, we should be happy. Fancy an apple quarrelling with the sun in spring for not warming him as he does in August! It would be no more preposterous than it is for men to quarrel with their circumstances. The fruit of our lives have their seasons like the fruit of our gardens; the winter and snows and the sharp winds are just as necessary to both as the fire of the summer heat; all growth is gradual, and we must accept the process through which we are brought to maturity, just as the apples do. It is not the same for all of us; some are ripened under the warm vibrating sun, others resist it, and, like certain winter fruit, require the cold twilight days to mellow them. But it matters little what the process is, it is sure to be the right one if we wait for it and accept it.”

“I wonder what stage of it I am in at the present moment,” said Aline. “I can’t say the sun has had much to do with it; the winds and the rain have been the busiest agents in my garden so far.”

“Patience, mademoiselle!” said M. Dalibouze. “The sun will come in his own good time.”

“You answer for that?”

“I do.”

Aline looked him straight in the face as she put the question like a challenge, and M. Dalibouze met the saucy bright eyes with a grave glance that had more of tenderness in it than she had ever seen there before. It flashed upon her for a moment that the sun might come to her through a less worthy medium than this kind, faithful, honorable man, and that she had been mayhap a fool to her own happiness in shutting the gate on him so contemptuously.

Perhaps the professor read the thought on her face, for he said in a penetrated tone, and fixing his eyes upon her:

“The true sun of life is marriage.”

It was an unfortunate remark. Aline tossed back her head, and burst out laughing. The spell that had held her for an instant was broken.

“A day will come when some one will tell you so, and you will not laugh, Mlle. Aline,” said M. Dalibouze humbly, and hiding his discomfiture under a smile.

This was the only time within the last two years that he had betrayed himself into any expression of latent hope with regard to Mlle. de Lemaque, and it had no sooner escaped him than he regretted it. The following Saturday, by way of atonement, he brought up a most desirable _parti_ for inspection, and next day Mme. Cléry was seized with the inevitable dusting fit. Nothing, however, came of it.

Things went on without any noticeable change at No. 13 till September, 1870, when Paris was declared in a state of siege. The sisters were not among those lucky ones who wavered for a time between going and staying, between the desire to put themselves in safe‐keeping, and the temptation of living through the _blocus_ and boasting of it for the rest of their days. There was no choice for them but to stay. Aline, as usual, made the best of it; she must stay, so she settled it in her mind that she liked to stay; that it would be a wonderful experience to live through the most exciting episode that could have broken up the stagnant monotony of their lives, and that, in fact, it was rather an enjoyable prospect than the reverse.

Mme. Cléry was commissioned to lay in as ample a store of provisions as their purse would allow. The good woman did the best she could with her means, and the little group encouraged each other to face the coming events like patriotic citizens, cheerfully and bravely. Of the magnitude of those events, or their own probable share in their national calamities, they had a very vague notion.