asleep at the head of his table endeavouring to--well--sleep off--shake off its fumes ere going to his box close by to hear La Gautier sing."
"What did you hear?" Desparre asked now.
"Gossip," the Marquise answered. "Gossip. Perhaps true--perhaps idle. God knows. The story of a man," she continued, with a shrug of her shoulders, "no longer young, once very poor, yet always with pistoles in his pocket, since he did not disdain to take gifts from a foolish woman whom he had wronged and who loved him."
"Was that mentioned?"
"It was hinted at. It was known, too, by one listener, at least--myself--to be true. A man," she continued, "now well to do, able to gratify almost every desire he possesses. Of high position. The story of a man," she went on with machine-like insistence, "who, finding at last, however, one desire he is not able to gratify--the desire of adding one more woman to his victims, and that a woman young enough to be his daughter--is about to change his character. To abandon that of knave, to adopt that of fool."
"Also," interrupted Monsieur le Duc, "a man who will demand from Madame la Marquise Grignan de Poissy the name of her gossip. It is to be desired that that gossip should be a man. Otherwise, her nephew the Marquis Grignan de Poissy will perhaps consent to be Madame's representative."
"To adopt the rôle of a fool," she continued, unheeding his words. "To marry the woman--the niece of a broken-down gamester--who refuses to become his victim. A creature bred up in the gutter!"
"Madame will allow that this--fool--is subject to no control or criticism?"
"Madame will allow anything that Monsieur le Duc desires. Even, if he pleases, that he is a coward and contemptible."
CHAPTER II
LES DEMOISELLES MONTJOIE AT HOME
Outside the snow had ceased to fall; in its place had come the clear, crisp, and biting stillness of an intense frost, accompanied by that penetrating cold which gives those who are subjected to it the feeling that they are themselves gradually freezing, that the blood within them is turning to ice itself. A cold, hard night; with the half-foot long icicles cracking from the increasing density of the frost, and falling, with a little clatter and a shivering, into atoms on the heads or at the feet of the passers-by; a night on which beggars huddled together for warmth in stoops and porches, or, being solitary, laid down moaning in their agony on doorsteps until, at the end, there came that warm, blissful glow which precedes death by frost. A night when the well-to-do who were abroad drew cloaks, roquelaures, and houppelandes tighter round them as they shivered and shook in chariots and sedan chairs; when dogs were brought in from kennels and placed before the blazing fires so that their unhappy carcases might be thawed back to life and comfort, and when horses in their stalls had rugs and cloths strapped over their backs so that, in the morning, they should not be found stretched dead upon their straw.
Inside, except in the garrets and other dwellings of the outcasts, who had neither fuel to their fires nor rags to their backs, every effort was made to expel the winter cold; wood fires blazed on hearths and in Alsatian stoves; each nook and cranny of every window was plugged carefully; while men, and in many cases, women as well, drank spiced Lunel and Florence, Richebourg and St. Georges, to keep their temperatures up. And drank copiously, too.
It was the coldest night of the winter 1719–20; the coldest night of that long spell of frost which had gripped Paris in its icy grasp.
Yet, in the salons of the Demoiselles Montjoie that frost was confronted--defeated; it seemed unable to penetrate into the warmed and scented rooms, over every door and window of which was hung arras and tapestry; unable to touch, and cause to shiver in touching, either the bare-shouldered women who lounged in the velvet fauteuils or the group of men who, in their turn, wandered aimlessly about.
"Confusion!" exclaimed one of the latter, a well-dressed, middle-aged man, "when is Susanne about to begin? What are we here for? To gaze into each other's fascinating faces or to recount our week-old scandals? The fiend take it! one might as well be at home and have been spared the encounter with the night air!"
"Have patience, Morlaix!" exclaimed a second; "the game never begins until the pigeons are here. Sportsmen fire not into the air, nor against one another. Do you want to win my louis-d'ors, or I yours? No, no! On the contrary, let us combine. So, so," he broke off, "there come two. The Prince Mirabel and Sainte Foix."
"Mirabel and Sainte Foix!" exclaimed the other. "Mirabel and Sainte Foix! My faith, all we shall get out of them will not make us fat. Sainte Foix cannot have got a thousand louis-d'ors left in the world, and those which he has Mirabel will attach for himself. Mon Dieu! that one of the Rohans should be one of us!"
The other shrugged his shoulders; then he said:
"Speak for yourself, mon ami. Meanwhile, I do not consider myself the same as Mirabel. I have not been kicked out of the army. I am no protector of all the sharpers in Paris. Speak for yourself, my friend. For yourself."
"Now, there," said the other, taking not the slightest notice of his acquaintance's protestations, which he probably reckoned at their proper value. "There is one who might be worth----"
"Nothing! He would have been once, but his money is all gone. La Mothe over there has had some of it, Mirabel also; even I have touched a little. Now, there is none to touch. They even say he owes the respected Duc Desparre twenty thousand livres, and cannot pay them."
"Desparre will expect them."
"That is possible. But I have great doubts--as to his ever getting them, I mean. Yet he is a gentleman, this Englishman; it may be he will find means to pay. It is a pity he does not ask his countryman, John Law, for assistance. He might put him in the way of making something."
"He might; though that I also doubt. Law has bigger friends to help than dissolute young Englishmen; and they are not countrymen, the financier being Scotch. Meanwhile, as I say, Desparre will expect his money. He will want it, rich as he is, for his honeymoon."
"His honeymoon! Faugh! the wretch. He is fifty if an hour. And, frankly, is it true? Has he bought Laure Vauxcelles?"
"Ay, body and soul; from her uncle Vandecque. She is his, and cannot escape; she is in his grip. There is no hope for her. Vandecque is her guardian; our law gives him full power over her. It is obedience to the guardian's orders--or--you know!"
"Yes, I know. A convent; the veil. I know. Ha! speak of the angels! Behold!" and his eyes turned towards the heavily-curtained doorway, at which a woman, accompanied by a man much her senior in years, appeared at the moment.
A woman! Nay! little more than a girl--yet a girl who ere long would be a beauteous woman. Tall and supple, with a figure giving promise of ripe fulness ere many months should have passed, with a face of sweet loveliness--possessing dark hazel eyes, an exquisite mouth, a head crowned with light chestnut hair, one curl of which (called by the roués of the Regent's Court a "follow me, young man") fell over the shoulder to the fair bosom beneath. The face of a girl to dream of by night, to stand before by day and worship.
No wonder that Desparre, forty-five years of age as he really was, and a dissolute, depraved roué to whom swift advancing age had brought no cessation of his evil yearnings, was supposed to have shown good taste in purchasing this modern Iphigenia, in buying her from her uncle, the gambler, Vandecque--the man who entered now by her side.
In this
