It was Madame who first entered the box, and Madame was bright with
youthful bloom, bright with jewels, and, moreover, a beauty. She was
a little creature, with childishly large eyes, a low, white forehead,
reddish-brown hair, and Greek nose and mouth.
“Clearly,” remarked the old lady in the box opposite, “not a
Frenchwoman. Her youth is too girlish, and she has too petulant an air
of indifference.”
This old lady in the box opposite was that venerable and somewhat severe
aristocrat, Madame de Castro, and having gazed for a moment or so a
little disapprovingly at the new arrival, she turned her glasses to the
young beauty’s companion and uttered an exclamation.
It was at Monsieur she was looking now. Monsieur had followed his wife
closely, bearing her fan and bouquet and wrap, and had silently seated
him self a little behind her and in the shadow.
“_Ciel!_” cried Madame de Castro, “what an ugly little man!”
It was not an unnatural exclamation. Fate had not been so kind to the
individual referred to as she might have been--in fact she had been
definitely cruel. He was small of figure, insignificant, dark, and wore
a patient sphynx-like air of gravity. He did not seem to speak or move,
simply sat in the shadow holding his wife’s belongings, apparently
almost entirely unnoticed by her.
“I don’t know him at all,” said Madame de Castro; “though that is not to
be wondered at, since I have exiled myself long enough to forget and be
forgotten by half Paris. What is his name?”
The gentleman at her side--a distinguished-looking old young man, with a
sarcastic smile--began with the smile, and ended with a half laugh.
“They call him,” he replied, “Le Monsieur de la petite Dame. His name is
Villefort.”
“Le Monsieur de la petite Dame,” repeated Madame, testily. “That is
a title of new Paris--the Paris of your Americans and English. It is
villainously ill-bred.”
M. Renard’s laugh receded into the smile again, and the smile became of
double significance.
“True,” he acquiesced, “but it is also villainously apropos. Look for
yourself.”
Madame did so, and her next query, after she had dropped her glass
again, was a sharp one.
“Who is she--the wife?”
“She is what you are pleased to call one of our Americans! You know
the class,”--with a little wave of the hand,--“rich, unconventional,
comfortable people, who live well and dress well, and have an
incomprehensibly _naïve_ way of going to impossible places and doing
impossible things by way of enjoyment. Our fair friend there, for
instance, has probably been round the world upon several occasions,
and is familiar with a number of places and objects of note fearful
to contemplate. They came here as tourists, and became fascinated with
European life. The most overwhelming punishment which could be inflicted
upon that excellent woman, the mother, would be that she should be
compelled to return to her New York, or Philadelphia, or Boston,
whichsoever it may be.”
“Humph!” commented Madame. “But you have not told me the name.”
“Madame Villefort’s? No, not yet. It was Trent--Mademoiselle Bertha
Trent.”
“She is not twenty yet,” said Madame, in a queer, grumbling tone. “What
did she marry that man for?”
“God knows,” replied M. Renard, not too devoutly, “Paris does not.”
For some reason best known to herself, Madame de Castro looked angry.
She was a shrewd old person, with strong whims of her own, even at
seventy. She quite glared at the pretty American from under her bushy
eyebrows.
“Le Monsieur de la petite Dame!” she fumed. “I tell you it is low--_low_
to give a man such names.”
“Oh!” returned Renard, shrugging his shoulders, “we did not give it to
him. It was an awkward servant who dubbed him so at first. She was new
to her position, and forgot his name, and being asked who had arrived,
stumbled upon this _bon mot: ‘Un monsieur, Madame--le monsieur de la
petite dame,’_--and, being repeated and tossed lightly from hand to
hand, it has become at last an established witticism, albeit bandied
under breath.”
It was characteristic of the august De Castro that during the remainder
of the evening’s entertainment she should occupy herself more with her
neighbors than with the opera. She aroused M. Renard to a secret ecstasy
of mirth by the sharp steadiness of her observation of the inmates of
the box opposite to them. She talked about them, too, in a tone not too
well modulated, criticising the beautifully dressed little woman,
her hair, her eyes, her Greek nose and mouth, and, more than all, her
indifferent expression and her manner of leaning upon the edge of her
box and staring at the stage as if she did not care for, and indeed
scarcely saw, what was going on upon it.
“That is the way with your American beauties,” she said. “They have no
respect for things. Their people spoil them--their men especially.
They consider themselves privileged to act as their whims direct. They
have not the gentle timidity of Frenchwomen. What French girl would have
the _sang froid_ to sit in one of the best boxes of the Nouvelle Opéra
and regard, with an actual air of _ennui_, such a performance as this?
She does not hear a word that is sung.”
“And we--do we hear?” bantered M. Renard.
“_Pouf!_” cried Madame. “We! We are world-dried and weather-beaten. We
have not a worm-eaten emotion between us. I am seventy, and you, who are
thirty-five, are the elder of the two. Bah! At that girl’s age I had
the heart of a dove.”
“But that is long ago,” murmured M. Renard, as if to himself. It
was quite human that he should slightly resent being classed with an
unamiable grenadier of seventy.
“Yes!” with considerable asperity. “Fifty years!” Then, with harsh
voice and withered face melted suddenly into softness quite _naïve, “Mon
Dieu!_” she said, “Fifty years since Arsène whispered into my ear at my
first opera, that he saw tears in my eyes!”
It was at this instant that there appeared in the Villefort box a new
figure,--that of a dark, slight young man of graceful movements,--in
fact, a young man of intensely striking appearance. M. Villefort rose
to receive him with serious courtesy, but the pretty American was not so
gracious. Not until he had seated himself at her side and spoken to her
did she turn her head and permit her eyes simply to rest upon his face.