“Ah!” cried Dinah, amazed, “you rich men take a gold piece out of your
purse as poor men bring out a farthing.... I do not know,” she went
on, turning to Lousteau, “whether it is taking an unfair advantage of a
guest to hope for a few lines--”
“Nay, madame, you flatter me. Bianchon is a great man, but I am too
insignificant!--Twenty years hence my name will be more difficult to
identify than that of the Public Prosecutor whose axiom, written in your
album, will designate him as an obscurer Montesquieu. And I should
want at least twenty-four hours to improvise some sufficiently bitter
reflections, for I could only describe what I feel.”
“I wish you needed a fortnight,” said Madame de la Baudraye graciously,
as she handed him the book. “I should keep you here all the longer.”
At five next morning all the party in the Chateau d’Anzy were astir,
little La Baudraye having arranged a day’s sport for the Parisians--less
for their pleasure than to gratify his own conceit. He was delighted to
make them walk over the twelve hundred acres of waste land that he
was intending to reclaim, an undertaking that would cost some hundred
thousand francs, but which might yield an increase of thirty to sixty
thousand francs a year in the returns of the estate of Anzy.
“Do you know why the Public Prosecutor has not come out with us?” asked
Gatien Boirouge of Monsieur Gravier.
“Why he told us that he was obliged to sit to-day; the minor cases are
before the Court,” replied the other.
“And did you believe that?” cried Gatien. “Well, my papa said to me,
‘Monsieur Lebas will not join you early, for Monsieur de Clagny has
begged him as his deputy to sit for him!’”
“Indeed!” said Gravier, changing countenance. “And Monsieur de la
Baudraye is gone to La Charite!”
“But why do you meddle in such matters?” said Bianchon to Gatien.
“Horace is right,” said Lousteau. “I cannot imagine why you trouble your
heads so much about each other; you waste your time in frivolities.”
Horace Bianchon looked at Etienne Lousteau, as much as to say
that newspaper epigrams and the satire of the “funny column” were
incomprehensible at Sancerre.
On reaching a copse, Monsieur Gravier left the two great men and Gatien,
under the guidance of a keeper, to make their way through a little
ravine.
“Well, we must wait for Monsieur Gravier,” said Bianchon, when they had
reached a clearing.
“You may be a great physician,” said Gatien, “but you are ignorant of
provincial life. You mean to wait for Monsieur Gravier?--By this time
he is running like a hare, in spite of his little round stomach; he is
within twenty minutes of Anzy by now----” Gatien looked at his watch.
“Good! he will be just in time.”
“Where?”
“At the chateau for breakfast,” replied Gatien. “Do you suppose I could
rest easy if Madame de la Baudraye were alone with Monsieur de Clagny?
There are two of them now; they will keep an eye on each other. Dinah
will be well guarded.”
“Ah, ha! Then Madame de la Baudraye has not yet made up her mind?” said
Lousteau.
“So mamma thinks. For my part, I am afraid that Monsieur de Clagny has
at last succeeded in bewitching Madame de la Baudraye. If he has been
able to show her that he had any chance of putting on the robes of the
Keeper of the Seals, he may have hidden his moleskin complexion, his
terrible eyes, his touzled mane, his voice like a hoarse crier’s, his
bony figure, like that of a starveling poet, and have assumed all the
charms of Adonis. If Dinah sees Monsieur de Clagny as Attorney-General,
she may see him as a handsome youth. Eloquence has great
privileges.--Besides, Madame de la Baudraye is full of ambition. She
does not like Sancerre, and dreams of the glories of Paris.”
“But what interest have you in all this?” said Lousteau. “If she is in
love with the Public Prosecutor!--Ah! you think she will not love him
for long, and you hope to succeed him.”
“You who live in Paris,” said Gatien, “meet as many different women as
there are days in the year. But at Sancerre, where there are not half
a dozen, and where, of those six, five set up for the most extravagant
virtue, when the handsomest of them all keeps you at an infinite
distance by looks as scornful as though she were of the blood royal, a
young man of two-and-twenty may surely be allowed to make a guess at her
secrets, since she must then treat him with some consideration.”
“Consideration! So that is what you call it in these parts?” said the
journalist with a smile.
“I should suppose Madame de la Baudraye to have too much good taste to
trouble her head about that ugly ape,” said Bianchon.
“Horace,” said Lousteau, “look here, O learned interpreter of human
nature, let us lay a trap for the Public Prosecutor; we shall be doing
our friend Gatien a service, and get a laugh out of it. I do not love
Public Prosecutors.”
“You have a keen intuition of destiny,” said Horace. “But what can we
do?”
“Well, after dinner we will tell sundry little anecdotes of wives
caught out by their husbands, killed, murdered under the most terrible
circumstances.--Then we shall see the faces that Madame de la Baudraye
and de Clagny will make.”
“Not amiss!” said Bianchon; “one or the other must surely, by look or
gesture--”
“I know a newspaper editor,” Lousteau went on, addressing Gatien, “who,
anxious to forefend a grievous fate, will take no stories but such as
tell the tale of lovers burned, hewn, pounded, or cut to pieces; of
wives boiled, fried, or baked; he takes them to his wife to read, hoping
that sheer fear will keep her faithful--satisfied with that humble
alternative, poor man! ‘You see, my dear, to what the smallest error may
lead you!’ says he, epitomizing Arnolfe’s address to Agnes.”
“Madame de la Baudraye is quite guiltless; this youth sees double,”
said Bianchon. “Madame Piedefer seems to me far too pious to invite her
daughter’s lover to the Chateau d’Anzy. Madame de la Baudraye would have
to hoodwink her mother, her husband, her maid, and her mother’s maid;
that is too much to do. I acquit her.”
“Well with more reason because her husband never ‘quits her,’” said
Gatien, laughing at his own wit.
“We can easily remember two or three stories that will make Dinah
quake,” said Lousteau. “Young man--and you too, Bianchon--let me beg you
to maintain a stern demeanor; be thorough diplomatists, an easy manner
without exaggeration, and watch the faces of the two criminals, you
know, without seeming to do so--out of the corner of your eye, or in a
glass, on the sly. This morning we will hunt the hare, this evening we
will hunt the Public Prosecutor.”
The evening began with a triumph for Lousteau, who returned the album to
the lady with this elegy written in it: