A WATERING-PLACE.
ARVILLARD LES BAINS,
2d August, ’76.
“Well, it is queer enough, this place from which I am writing to
you. Imagine a square hall, very lofty, paved with stones, done in
stucco work--a sonorous hall, where the daylight falling through two
enormous windows is veiled down to the lowest pane with blue curtains
and further obscured by a sort of floating vapor, having a taste of
sulphur in it, which clings to one’s clothes and tarnishes one’s gold
ornaments. In this hall are people seated near the walls, on benches,
chairs and stools round little tables--people who look at their watches
every minute, get up and go out, leaving their seats to others, letting
one see each time through the half-open door a mob of bathers moving
about in the brightly lit vestibule and the flowing white aprons of the
serving women who dash here and there. In spite of all this movement,
no noise, but a continual murmur of conversation in low voices,
newspapers being unfolded, badly oxidized pens scratching on paper, a
solemnity as in a church--the whole place bathed and refreshed by the
big stream of mineral water arranged in the middle of the hall, the
rush of which breaks itself against a disk of metal, is crushed to
pieces, separates in jets and turns to powder above the great basins
placed one upon the other and all dripping with moisture. This is the
inhalation hall.
“I must let you know, my dear girl, that everybody does not inhale in
the same way. For instance, the old gentleman who sits in front of me
at this moment follows the prescriptions of the doctor to the letter,
for I recognize them all. Our feet placed upon a stool and our chest
pushed forward, let us pull in our elbows and keep our mouth open all
the time to make the inspiration easy. Poor, dear man! How he does
inhale, with what a confidence in the result! What little round eyes he
has, credulous and devout, which seem to be saying to the spring:
“‘O spring of Arvillard, cure me well; see how I inhale you, see what
faith I have in you--’
“Then we have the skeptic, who inhales without inhaling, his back
bent, shrugging his shoulders and rolling up his eyes. Then there are
the discouraged ones, the people who are really sick and feel the
uselessness and nothingness of all this. One poor lady, my neighbor,
I see putting her finger quickly to her mouth every little while to
see if her glove is not stained at the tip with a red blot. But, all
the same, people find some means to be gay. Ladies who belong in the
same hotel push their chairs near to each other, form groups, do their
embroidery, gossip in a low voice, discuss the newspaper of the baths
and the list of strangers just arrived. Young persons bring out their
English novels in red covers, priests read their breviaries--there are
a great many priests at Arvillard, particularly missionaries with big
beards, yellow faces, voices hoarse from having preached so long the
word of God. As to me, you know I don’t care about novels, particularly
those novels of to-day in which everything happens just like things in
everyday life. So for my part I take up my correspondence with two or
three designated victims--Marie Tournier, Aurélie Dansaert and you,
great big sister whom I adore! Look out for regular journals! Just
think, two hours of inhalation in four times, and that every day!
Nobody here inhales as much as I do, which is as much as saying that I
am a real phenomenon. People look at me a good deal for this reason and
I have no little pride in it.
“As to the rest of the treatment--nothing else except the glass of
mineral water which I go and drink at the spring in the morning and
evening, and which ought to triumph over the obstinate veil which this
horrid cold has thrown over my voice. There is the special point of the
Arvillard waters and for that reason the singers and songstresses make
this place their rendezvous. Handsome Mayol has just left us, with his
vocal cords entirely renewed. Mlle. Bachellery, whom you remember--the
little diva at your reception--has found herself so well in consequence
of the treatment that after having finished three regular weeks she
has begun three more, wherefore doth the newspaper of the baths bestow
upon her great praise. We have the honor of dwelling in the same hotel
with that young and illustrious person, adorned with a tender Bordeaux
mother, who at the _table d’hôte_ advertises ‘good appetites’ in the
salad and talks of the one-hundred-and-forty-franc bonnet which her
young lady wore at the last Longchamps races--a delicious couple, and
greatly admired among us all! We go into ecstasies over the childish
graces of Bébé, as her mother calls her, over her laughter, her trills,
the tossings of her short skirt. We crowd together in front of the
sanded courtyard of the hotel in order to see her do her game of
croquet with the little girls and little boys--she will play with none
but the little ones--to see her run and jump and send her ball like a
real street boy.
“‘Look out, I’m going to roquet you, Master Paul!’
“Everybody says of her, ‘What a child she is!’ As for me, I believe
that those false childish ways are a part of a rôle which she is
playing, just like her skirts with big bows on them and her hair looped
up postillon-style. Then she has such an extraordinary way of kissing
that great big Bordeaux woman, of suspending herself to her neck, of
allowing herself to be cradled and held in her lap before all the
world! You know well enough how caressing I am--well, honor bright! it
makes me feel embarrassed when I kiss mamma.
“A very singular family, too, but less amusing, consists of the
Prince and Princess of Anhalt, of Mademoiselle their daughter, and
the governess, chamber-women and suite, who occupy the entire first
floor of the hotel and are the grand personages thereof. I often meet
the princess on the stair going up step by step on the arm of her
husband--a handsome gallant, bursting with health under his military
hat turned up with blue. She never goes to the bathing-hall except in
a sedan chair and it is heartrending to see that wrinkled and pale
face behind the little pane of the chair; father and child walk at the
side, the child very wretched-looking, with all the features of her
mother and very likely also all of her malady. This little creature,
eight years old, who is not allowed to play with the other children and
who looks down sadly from the balcony on the games of croquet and the
riding-parties at the hotel, bores herself to death. They think that
her blood is too blue for such common joys and prefer to keep her in
the gloomy atmosphere of that dying mother, by the side of that father
who shows his sick wife to the public with an impudent and worn-out
face, or give the child over to the servants.
“But heavens, it’s a kind of pest, it’s an infectious disease, this
nobility business! These people take their meals by themselves in
a little dining-room; they inhale by themselves--because there are
separate halls for families--and you can imagine the mournfulness of
that companionship--that woman and the little girl together in a great
silent vault!
“The other evening we were together in considerable number in the
big room on the ground floor where the guests unite to play little
games, sing and even occasionally to dance. Mamma Bachellery had just
accompanied Bébé in a cavatina from an opera--you know ‘we’ want to
enter the opera; in fact, we have come to Arvillard to ‘cure up our
voice for that’ according to the elegant expression of the mother. All
of a sudden the door opened and the princess made her appearance, with
that grand air which is her own--near her end but elegant, wrapped in
the lace mantle which hides the terrible and significant narrowness of
her shoulders. The little girl and the father followed.
“‘Go on, I beg of you--’ coughed the poor woman.
“And would you believe it? that idiot of a little singer must choose
out of all her repertory the most harrowing, the most sentimental
ballad ‘_Vorrei morir_,’ something like our ‘Dying Leaves’ in Italian,
a ballad of a sick woman who fixes the date of her death in autumn, in
order to give herself the illusion that all nature will die along with
her, enveloped in the first autumnal fog as in a winding sheet!
“‘_Vorrei morir nella stagion dell’ anno._’
(Oh! let me pass away when dies the year.)
“It is a graceful air, but with a sadness in it which is increased by
the caressing sound of the Italian words; and there in the middle of
that big drawing-room, into which penetrated all sorts of perfumes
through the open window, the little breezes, too, and the freshness of
a fine summer night, this longing to live on until autumn, this truce
and surcease asked of the malady took on something too poignant to
bear. Without saying a word, the princess stood up and quickly left the
room. In the shadows of the garden I heard a sob, one long sob, then
the voice of a man scolding, and then those tearful complaints which a
child makes when it sees its mother sorrowing.
“That is the mournfulness of such watering-places: these miseries
concerning health which meet one everywhere, these persistent coughs
scarcely deadened by the hotel partitions, these precautions taken with
handkerchiefs pressed upon the mouth in order to keep off the air,
these chats and confidences, the miserable meaning of which one divines
from the hand moving toward the chest or toward the back near the
shoulder-blade, from the sleepy manner, the dragging gait and the fixed
idea of misfortune.
“Mamma, poor mamma, who knows the stages in sickness of the lungs,
says that at Eaux-Bonnes or at Mont Dore it is a very different thing
from what it is here. To Arvillard people send only convalescents
like myself or else desperate cases for which nothing can do any more
good. Luckily at our hotel Alpes Dauphinoises we have only three sick
persons of that sort, the princess and two young Lyon people, brother
and sister, orphans and very rich, they say, who appear to be on their
last legs; especially the sister, with that pallid complexion of the
Lyon women, as if seen under water; she’s wound up in morning gowns
and knit shawls, without one jewel or ribbon--not a single glimpse of
coquetry about her!
“She looks poverty-stricken, that rich girl; she is certainly lost and
she knows it; she is in despair and abandons herself to despair. On
the other hand, in the bent figure of the young man, tightly squeezed
into a fashionable jacket, there is a certain terrible determination to
live, an incredible force of resistance to the malady.
“‘My sister has no spring in her--but I have plenty!’ said he the other
day at the _table d’hôte_, in a voice quite eaten away, which is as
difficult to hear as the _ut_ note of Vauters the diva when she sings.
And the fact is, he does have springs in the most surprising way; he
is the make-fun of the hotel, the organizer of games, card-parties
and excursions; he goes out riding and driving in sleds, that kind of
little sled laden with fagots on which the mountaineers of this country
toboggan you down the steepest slopes; he waltzes and fences, shaken
with the terrible spasms of coughing which never stop him for a moment.
“We have, beside, a medical luminary here--you remember him--Dr.
Bouchereau, the man whom mamma went to consult about our poor Andrew. I
do not know whether he has recognized us, but he never bowed--a regular
old bear!
“I have just come from drinking my half-glass of water at the spring.
This precious spring is ten minutes away, as one ascends in the
direction of the high peak, in a gorge where a torrent all feathery
with foam rolls and thunders, having come from the glacier which closes
the view, a glacier shining and clear between the blue Alps that
seems to be forever crumbling and dissolving its invisible and snowy
base into that white mass of beaten water. Great black rocks dripping
constantly among the ferns and lichens, the groves of pine and a dark
green foliage, a soil in which spicules of mica glitter in the coal
dust--that is the place; but something that I cannot express to you
is the tremendous noise of the torrent tearing among the stones and
of the steam-hammer of a lumber mill, which the water sets in action;
and then, besides, in this narrow gorge, on its single road, which
is always crowded, there are coal-carts, long files of mules, riding
parties of excursionists and the water drinkers going and coming. I
forgot to mention the apparition at the doors of wretched dwellings of
some horrible male or female cretin, displaying a hideous goitre, a
great big idiotic face with an open and grumbling mouth! Cretinism is
one of the products of the country; it seems that Nature here is too
strong for human beings and that the minerals and the rest--copper,
iron and sulphur--seize, strangle and suffocate them; that that water
flowing from the peaks chills them as it does those wretched trees
which one sees growing all dwarfed between two crags. There’s another
of those impressions made upon a new arrival, the mournfulness and
horror of which disappear in the course of a few days.
“For now, instead of flying from them, I have my special pet sufferers
from goitre, one in particular, a frightful little monster, perched on
the border of the road in a chair fit for a child of three years old;
but he is sixteen, exactly the age of Mlle. Bachellery. When I near
him, he dodders about his head, as heavy as a stone, and gives forth
a hoarse cry, a crushed cry without understanding and without style;
and as soon as he has received his piece of silver, he raises it in
triumph toward a charcoal-woman, who is watching him from the corner of
a window. He is a piece of good fortune envied by a great many mothers,
for this hideous creature takes in, by himself alone, more than his
three brothers do, who are at work at the furnaces of La Debout. His
father does nothing at all; afflicted with consumption, he passes the
winter by his poor man’s hearth and in summer installs himself on a
bench with other unhappy ones in the warm mist which the hot springs
create as they pour forth.
“The young lady of the springs, in her white apron and with dripping
hands, fills the glasses which are held out to her, as they come along,
while in the courtyard near by, separated from the road by a low wall,
heads are seen, the bodies of which one cannot perceive, heads thrown
backward, contorted with their efforts, grinning in the sunshine, their
mouths wide open; ’tis an illustration for the Inferno of Dante: the
sinners damned to gargling!
“Sometimes, when we leave, we go the big round while returning to the
establishment and descend by the country way. Mamma, whom the noise of
the hotel fatigues and who particularly fears lest I should dance too
much in the drawing-room, had indulged the dream of hiring a little
house in Arvillard, where there is plenty of choice at every door; on
every story there are bills, which flutter among the potted plants
between the fresh and tempting curtains. One asks oneself what on earth
becomes of the inhabitants during the season; do they camp in bands
on the surrounding mountains, or do they go and live in the hotel at
fifty francs a day? It would surprise me if it were so, for that magnet
which they carry in their eye when they look at the bather seems to me
terribly rapacious--there is something in it which glitters and catches
hold.
“Yes, that same shining something, that sudden gleam on the forehead of
my little boy with the goitre, reflected from his piece of silver--I
find it everywhere; on the spectacles of the little nervous doctor
who auscults me every morning, in the eyes of the good sugarly-sweet
ladies who ask you in to examine their houses, their most convenient
little gardens, crammed with holes full of water and kitchens on the
ground floor to serve the apartments in the third story; in the eyes
of carmen with their short blouses and lacquered hats decked with big
ribbons, who make signs to you from the boxes of their carryalls; in
the look cast by the donkey-boy standing in front of the wide-open barn
in which long ears switch to and fro; yes, even in the glances of these
donkeys, in their long look of obstinacy and gentleness, I have seen
that metallic hardness which the love of money gives; I have seen it,
it exists.
“After all, their houses are frightful, huddled together and mournful,
having no outlook, full of disagreeable points of all kinds which are
impossible to ignore, because your attention has been drawn to them
in the house next door. Decidedly we shall stick to our caravansary,
the Alpes Dauphinoises, which lies hot in the sun on its height and
steeps its red bricks and uncountable green shutters in the middle
of an English park not yet of age, a park with hedges, labyrinth and
sanded roads, the enjoyment of which it shares with five or six other
overgrown hotels of the country--La Chevrette, La Laita, Le Bréda, La
Planta.
“All these hotels with Savoy names are in a state of ferocious rivalry;
they spy upon each other, watch each other across the copses, and there
is a merry war as to which shall put on the most style with its bells,
its pianos, the whip-cracking of its postilions, its expenditure of
fireworks; or which one shall throw its windows widest open in order
that the animation there, the laughter, songs and dances shall appeal
to the visitors lodged in the opposite hotel and make them say:
“‘How they do amuse themselves down there! What a lot of people they
must have!’
“But the place where the hottest battle goes on between the rival
taverns is in the columns of the _Bathers’ Gazette_, where those lists
of new arrivals are printed, which the little sheet gives with minute
exactness, twice a week.
“What envious rage at the Laita or the Planta when, for example, they
read:
“‘_Prince and Princess of Anhalt and their suite, ... Alpes
Dauphinoises._’
“Everything becomes colorless in the light of that crushing line. What
response can there be? They rack their brains; they try their wits; if
you are possessed of a _de_ or some title, they drag it out and flaunt
it. Why, here’s La Chevrette has been serving us up the very same
Inspector of Forests three times under as many different species, as
Inspector, as Marquis, and as Chevalier of Saints Maurice and Lazarus;
but the Alpes Dauphinoises is still wearing the cockade, though you may
be sure it is not on our account. Great heavens! You know how retiring
mamma always is, and afraid of her shadow; well, she took good care
to forbid Fanny saying who we were, because the position of papa and
that of your husband might have drawn about us too much idle curiosity
and social riffraff. The newspaper said merely _Mesdames Le Quesnoy
de Paris, ... Alpes Dauphinoises_; and as Parisians are few and far
between our incognito has not been unveiled.
“We are very simply arranged, but comfortably enough--two rooms on
the second floor, the whole valley lying before us, an amphitheatre
of mountains black with pine woods far below--mountains which show
various shades and get lighter and lighter as they rise with their
streaks of eternal snow; barren steeps close upon little farms which
look like squares in green and yellow and rose, among which the
haycocks look no larger than bee-hives.
“But this beautiful landscape does little to keep us in our rooms.
In the evening there is the drawing-room, in the day time we wander
through the park to carry out the treatment. In connection with an
existence so full and yet so empty, the treatment takes hold of
and absorbs you. The amusing hour is the one after breakfast, when
groups are formed about the little tables for coffee under the big
lime-tree at the entrance of the garden; this is the hour for arrivals
and departures. People exchange good-byes and shake hands about the
carriage which is taking off the bathers; the hotel people press
forward, their eyes brilliant with that shiny look, that famous sheen
of the Savoyard; we kiss people whom we hardly know; handkerchiefs are
waved; the horse-bells jangle, and then the heavy and crowded wagon
disappears, swaying along the narrow road on the side of the hill,
carrying off with it those names and faces which for a moment have
made a part of our life in common, those faces unknown yesterday and
to-morrow forgot.
“Others come and install themselves after their own fashion. I imagine
that this is like the monotony of packet-ships, with the change of
faces at every port. All this going and coming amuses me, but poor
dear mamma continues to be very sorrowful, very much absorbed, in spite
of the smile which she tries to give when I look at her. I can guess
that every detail of our lives brings with it for her a heartrending
souvenir, a memory of the gloomiest images. Poor thing, she saw so
many of those caravansaries of sick people during that year when she
followed her poor dying boy from stage to stage, in the lowlands or on
the mountains, beneath the pines or at the edge of the sea, with hope
always deceived and that eternal resignation which she was ever obliged
to show during her martyrdom.
“I do think that Jarras might have arranged to save her from the memory
of this sorrow; for as for me, I am not sick, I cough hardly at all,
and with the exception of my disgusting huskiness, which leaves me with
a voice fit for crying vegetables in the street, I have never been so
well in my life. A real devilish appetite, would you believe it? fits
of hunger so terrible that I can hardly wait for a meal! Yesterday,
after a breakfast with thirty dishes, with a menu more involved than
the Chinese alphabet, I saw a woman stemming raspberries before our
door. All of a sudden a desire seized me; two bowls full, my dear girl,
two bowls full of the great big fresh raspberries, ‘the fruit of the
country,’ as our waiter calls them, and there you have my appetite!
“All the same, my dear, how lucky it is that neither you nor I have
taken the malady of that poor brother of ours, whom I hardly knew
and whose discouraged expression, which is shown on his portrait in
our parents’ chamber, comes back to me here, when I see other faces
with their drawn features! And what an odd fish is this doctor who
formerly took care of him, this famous Bouchereau! The other day
mamma wanted to present me to him; in order to obtain a consultation
with him we prowled around the park in the neighborhood of the old,
long-legged fellow with his brutal and harsh face. But he was very much
surrounded by the Arvillard doctors, who were listening to him with
all the humbleness of pupils. Then we waited for him at the close of
the inhalation; all our labor in vain! The fellow set off walking at
such a pace that it seemed as if he wished to avoid us. You know with
mamma one does not get over ground fast; so we missed him again this
time. Finally, yesterday morning, Fanny went on our part to ask of his
housekeeper if he could receive us; he sent back word that he was at
the baths to care for his own health and not to give medical advice!
There’s a boor for you! It is quite true that I have never seen such
a pallor as he presents; it is like wax; papa is a highly-colored
gentleman by the side of him. He lives only upon milk, never comes
down to the dining-room and still less to the drawing-room. Our little
nervous doctor, the one whom I call M. That’s-what-you-need, will
have it that he is the victim of a very dangerous heart malady and it
is only the waters of Arvillard which have for the past three years
permitted him to stay alive.
“‘That’s what you need! That’s what you need!’
“That is all that one can make out in the babble of this funny little
man, as vain as he is garrulous, who whirls round our apartments every
morning.
“‘Doctor, I don’t sleep--I believe this treatment agitates me’....
‘That’s what you need!’ ‘Doctor, I am always so sleepy--I think it must
be that mineral water.’... ‘That’s what you need!’
“What he seems to need more than anything else is that his tour
of visits should be made quickly, in order that he may be at his
consultation office before ten o’clock, in that little fly-box where
the patients are crammed together as far out as the stairs and down
the steps as far as the curb-stone. And I can tell you he doesn’t
loaf much, but whips you off a prescription without stopping for one
moment his jumping and prancing, like a bather who is trying to get his
‘reaction.’
“O, yes, that reaction! That’s another story, too. As for me, I shall
take neither baths nor douches, so I don’t make my reaction, but I
remain sometimes a quarter of an hour under the lindens of the park,
looking at the march up and down of all these people who walk with
long, regular steps and a deeply absorbed look, passing each other
without saying one word. My old gentleman of the inhalation hall, the
man who tries to propitiate the springs, carries on this exercise with
the same punctuality and conscientiousness. At the entrance to the
shaded walk he comes to a full stop, shuts his white umbrella, turns
down the collar of his coat, looks at his watch, and--forward, march!
Each leg stiff, elbows to his side, one, two! one, two! as far as
the long pencil of white light which the absence of a tree, forming
there an opening, throws across the alley at that point. He never goes
farther than that, raises his arms three times as if he had dumb-bells
in his hands, then returns in the same fashion, brandishes dumb-bells
once more, and does this for fifteen turns, one after the other. I have
an idea that the department for the crazy people at Charenton must have
somewhat the same features that my alley presents about eleven o’clock
in the morning.”
6 August.
“So it is true, after all, Numa is coming to see us? O, how delighted
I am! how delighted I am! Your letter has just come by the one o’clock
mail which is distributed at the office of the hotel. It is a solemn
moment which is decisive of the hue and color of the entire day. The
office is crammed and people arrange themselves in a semicircle around
fat Mme. Laugeron, who is very imposing in her morning gown of blue
flannel, whilst in her authoritative voice with a bit of manner in it,
the voice of a former lady’s companion, she reads off the many-colored
addresses of the mail. At the call each one advances, and it is my duty
to tell you that we put a certain amount of personal pride in having
a big mail. In what does one not show some personal pride, for the
matter of that, during this perpetual rubbing shoulders of vanities and
of follies? Just to think that I should reach the point of being proud
of my two hours of inhalation!
“‘The Prince of Anhalt--M. Vasseur--Mlle. Le Quesnoy--’ Deceived again!
it is only my fashion journal. ‘Mlle. Le Quesnoy--’ I give a glance to
see if there is nothing more for me and skip with your dear letter away
down to the end of the garden, where there is a bench surrounded by big
walnuts.
“Here it is--this is my own bench, the corner where I go to be alone in
order to dream and build my Spanish castles; for it is a singular thing
that in order to invent well and to develop oneself intellectually
according to the precepts laid down by M. Baudouy, I do not need very
wide horizons. If my landscape is too big, I lose myself in it, I
scatter myself, ’tis all up with me. The only bore about my bench is
the neighborhood of the swing, where that little Bachellery girl passes
half her day in letting herself be swung into space by the young man
who believes in having springs. I should think he must have plenty of
spring in order to push her that way by the hour together; at every
moment come babyish cries and musical roulades: ‘Higher, higher yet, a
little more--’
“Heavens! How that girl does get on my nerves! I wish that swing would
pass her off and up into a cloud and that she would never come back
again!
“Things are so nice upon my bench, so far away, when she is not there!
I have thoroughly enjoyed your letter, the postscript of which made me
utter a cry of delight.
“O, blessed be Chambéry and its new college and that corner-stone to
be laid, which brings the Minister of Public Instruction into our
district. He will be very comfortable here for the preparation of his
speech, either walking about our shady alley, the ‘reaction alley,’
(come, that wasn’t bad for a pun!) or else beneath my walnuts, when
Miss Bachellery is not scaring them with her cries. My dear Numa! I
get on so well with him; he is so lively, so gay! How we shall chat
together about our Rosalie and the serious motive which prevents her
from travelling at this time--O great Heavens, that was a secret!--and
poor mamma, who has made me swear so often about it! she is the one who
will be glad enough to see dear Numa again. On this occasion she quite
lost every sort of timidity or modesty; you ought to have seen the
majesty with which she entered the office of the hotel in order to take
an apartment for her son-in-law, the Minister! O, what fun, the face of
our landlady hearing this news!
“‘Why--what--my ladies, you are--you were--?’
“‘Yes, we were--yes, we are--’
“Her broad face turned lilac and poppy-colored--a very palette for an
impressionist painter. And so with M. Laugeron and the entire hotel
service. Since our arrival we have been demanding an extra candlestick
in vain; now there are five on the chimneypiece. I can promise you that
Numa will be well served and installed; they will give him the first
story, occupied by the Prince of Anhalt, which will be vacant in three
days. It appears that the waters of Arvillard are bad for the princess;
and even the little doctor himself believes it is better that she
should leave as quickly as possible. That is what is best--because if
a tragedy should occur the Alpes Dauphinoises would never recover from
the blow.
“It is really pitiable, the hurry there is about the departure of these
wretched people, the way they edge them off, the way they shove them
along in consequence of that magnetic hostility which places seem to
exhale where a person is no longer wanted. Poor Princess of Anhalt,
whose arrival here was made such a festival! a little more and they
would have her conducted to the borders of the department between two
policemen--that is the hospitality of watering places!
“And by the way, how about Bompard? You haven’t told me whether he
is coming too or not. Dangerous Bompard! If he should come I am
quite capable of eloping with him on some glacier. What intellectual
development might we not discover between us, as we approached the
snowy peaks! I laugh, I am so delighted--and I go on inhaling, a
little embarrassed, it is true, by the neighborhood of that terrible
Bouchereau, who has just come in and seated himself two seats away from
me.
“What an obdurate air he has, that man, to be sure! His hands crossed
on the knob of his cane and chin resting on his hands, he talks away
in a high voice, looking straight ahead, without really speaking to
anybody. Do you suppose that I must take it as a lesson for me, what
he says of the lack of prudence among the ladies who bathe, about
their gowns of thin linen, about the folly of going out of doors after
dinner in a country where the evenings are mortally cold? Horrid man,
one would believe he is aware that I propose this evening to beg for
charities at the Arvillard church in aid of the work of the propaganda!
Father Olivieri is to describe from the pulpit his missionary trips
into Thibet, his captivity and martyrdom, while Mlle. Bachellery will
sing the ‘Ave Maria’ of Gounod, and I am going to have the greatest
fun on our return to the hotel, marching through all the little dark
streets by lantern-light, just like a regular ‘retreat’ with torches.
“If that is a consultation on my health which M. Bouchereau was giving
me, I don’t want it; it is too late. In the first place, my very dear
sir! I have full permission from my little doctor, who is far more
amiable than you are and has even allowed me to take a turn at a waltz
in the drawing-room at the close. Oh, only a little one, of course;
besides, if I dance a little too much, everybody goes for me! They do
not understand that I am robust, notwithstanding a figure like a long
lead-pencil and that a Parisian girl never gets ill from dancing too
much. ‘Look out now--don’t tire yourself too much.’ This woman will
bring me up my shawl, that man will close the window at my back for
fear that I should catch cold; but the most interested of all is the
youth with springs, because he has discovered that I have a devilish
deal more springs than his sister.
“Poor girl, that would not be difficult! Between you and me, I believe
that, rendered desperate by the frigidity of Alice Bachellery, this
young gentleman has retired upon me and proposes to make love to
me--but alas, how he loses his labor; for my heart is taken, it is all
Bompard’s!--O, well, after all, no, it is _not_ Bompard’s, and you know
that too. The personage in my romance is not Bompard, it is--it is--ha,
ha! so much the worse for you! my hour is up; I will tell you some
other day, Miss Haughtiness!”