THE EARTHQUAKE
This rosy vision of Boury with her duke lasted Trimousette just
twenty-four hours. The duke, on reflection, concluded that Boury was
too far away from Paris, where all was tumult and uncertainty. It
was not too far away from Madame de Valençay, of whom the duke was
now almost weary, but for him to go to Brittany might look as if
he were running away from their Majesties, who were in very great
danger. So, the next evening, the duke again came into Trimousette’s
little room and told her it was not Boury to which they would go, but
Belgarde, near to Versailles. He even condescended to give his reasons.
Trimousette listened with a mute, unmoved face. She was so used to
disappointments that she took them without protest. Of course, she
thought the real reason was Madame de Valençay, and when the duke left
the room, she went and looked at herself in the mirror.
“No, Trimousette,” she said to herself, “you are not pretty; your eyes
are dark, and you have long, soft, black hair, and little feet. But
that is not beauty. Nor is the love of the most splendid duke in France
for you, although you may be his wife.”
The duke invited a great party to spend the week at the château,
and the little duchess went soberly through her duties as hostess.
Everybody said she was much too quiet, which was true. Others said she
had no feeling, which was ridiculously false.
The party was very gay. The world was rapidly turning upside down.
Nobody had any money, the black clouds and red lightnings and
earthquake shocks were bewildering men’s minds, so the only thing to do
was to laugh, to dance, to sing.
That is what the company at the Château de Belgarde did, the duke
leading all the wild spirits in the party.
The one comfort the little duchess had was that her brother Victor was
among the roysterers. He was ever kind to her, but like her husband, a
trifle careless. Victor was working night and day at a little play, to
be produced in the private theatre at Belgarde. It was meant to shadow
forth the final triumph of the aristocracy over the people, who were
making themselves to be seen and heard and felt at every turn. The play
was to be produced on the night before the party broke up.
Now, it was the fixed and grim determination of the duke that Madame
de Valençay should not track him to Belgarde, to worry him. But the
lady was too clever for him. He could not prevent her from visiting a
neighboring château, and coming over with a large party to spend the
day at Belgarde, as country neighbors do everywhere.
Never had Madame de Valençay looked more deliciously seductive than on
that day. She might have sat for one of Botticelli’s nymphs in her soft
wine draperies without a hoop, being in the country, her long fair hair
in curls about her shoulders, and wearing a hat crowned with roses.
In contrast to this dazzling creature was the pale little duchess
sombrely dressed, her silence, which verged on awkwardness, placing her
at the greatest disadvantage beside the brilliant, rippling talk of
Madame de Valençay and her laughter like the music of a fountain.
In one thing only did the duchess carry off the palm. Madame de
Valençay, like a peacock, was all beauty except her feet, which were
large and ill-shaped. The duchess’s small, arched feet looked smaller
than ever in the dainty black shoes with black silk stockings which she
wore.
Trimousette had shown no sign of chagrin when Madame de Valençay
arrived with a merry party, all laughing and chattering like so many
birds in spring. It was a part of her reticent pride to make no
complaint, to show no uneasiness. The duke was furiously angry with
Madame de Valençay for hunting him down, but she was so beautiful,
she tripped up and down the terrace with such airy grace, she was so
wickedly merry at his expense, that, manlike, he forgave her.
This week, which Trimousette had pictured to herself as so charming,
turned out to be one of the most trying of her life. She scarcely
saw her duke except in the evening when the saloons were full of
persons, and there was much fiddling and dancing. Nor did she see
much more of Victor, who was keen about his play. The very last
evening of all it was produced and was a huge success. By some sort of
hocus-pocus, Madame de Valençay had forced herself into the cast, and
made a divinely beautiful marquise, to whom the duke, as a soldier of
fortune, made violent love and made it well, too, his duchess looking
on with a face composed, almost dull. Victor himself was disguised
most bewitchingly as a ragpicker, and in his character denounced the
aristocracy furiously, to the uproarious delight of his audience.
It was the most amusing thing in the world, and all the fine ladies and
gentlemen nearly died of laughing at it. The heart of the young duchess
alone did not respond to this ridicule of the earthquakes and the storm
clouds. She remembered the words of the washerwomen and the cooks, and
the strange glare in their eyes and their pinched faces.
The gayety of the party lasted until midnight, when the ball after
the play and the supper was nearly over. Then a messenger, pale and
breathless with hard riding from Paris, arrived on a spent horse, and
told how the people had gone to Versailles and had carried the king
and queen and their children and Madame Elizabeth off to Paris. How
the king, foolish and shamefaced, had appeared on the balcony of the
Tuileries with the red cap of liberty on his head, and how the royal
people were no better than prisoners in that palace, and that Paris had
gone mad.
There were no cowards among this party at the Château of Belgarde
except Madame de Valençay. Much as she loved the duke, she loved her
own skin better, and privately resolved to seek shelter in England
until the shower was over, not knowing it to be the deluge.
The duke, who had not a drop of coward’s blood in him, started
for Paris at daylight. He took his duchess with him, not that he
particularly cared for her society, but because it did not enter his
rash head that anybody should be afraid of anything. So to Paris they
went, and on the next night the duke was visited by a deputation of
rapscallions calling themselves the National Guard, thrust into a
wretched hackney coach with a ruffian on each side of him, and cast
into the prison of the Temple as a conspirator against the liberties of
the people.
[Illustration]
_PART THREE_
[Illustration]