Читать книгу Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists онлайн

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‘No one of any note. Did you not remark it was a hired coach? “Les honnêtes gens” do not sacrifice to Saint Fiacre.’

Madame Troqueville gave rather a melancholy little smile, but her own epigram had restored Madeleine, for the time being, to good humour. They talked amicably together for a little, and then again fell into silence, Madeleine wearing a look of intense concentration.

Madame Pilou’s house was on the first floor above the shop of a laundress. They were shown into her bedroom, the usual place of reception in those days. The furniture was of walnut, in the massive style of Henri IV., and covered with mustard-coloured serge. Heavy curtains of moquette kept out the light and air, and enabled the room to preserve what Madeleine called the ‘bourgeois smell.’ On the walls, however, was some fine Belgian tapestry, on which was shown, with macabre Flemish realism, the Seven Stations of the Cross. It had been chosen by the son Robert, who was fanatically devout.

Madame Pilou, dressed in a black dressing-gown lined with green plush, and wearing a chaperon (a sort of cap worn in the old days by every bourgeoise, but by that time rarely seen), was lying on the huge carved bed. Her face, with its thick, gray beard, looming huge and weather-beaten from under the tasselled canopy, was certainly very ugly, but its expression was not unpleasing. Monsieur Troqueville and Jacques had already arrived. Monsieur Troqueville was a man of about fifty, with a long beard in the doctor’s mode, a very long nose, and small, excited blue eyes, like a child’s. Jacques was rather a beautiful young man; he was tall and slight, and had a pale, pointed face and a magnificent chevelure of chestnut curls, and his light eyes slanting slightly up at the corners gave him a Faun-like look. He was a little like Madeleine, but he had a mercurial quality which was absent in her. Robert Pilou was there too, standing before the chimney-piece; he was dressed in a very rusty black garment, made to look as much like a priest’s cassock as possible. Jacques said that with his spindly legs and red nose and spectacles, he was exactly like old Gaultier-Garguille, a famous actor of farce at the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and as the slang name for the Hôtel de Bourgogne was, for some unknown reason, the ‘Pois-Pilés,’ Jacques, out of compliment to Robert’s appearance and Madame Pilou’s beard, called their house the ‘Poil-Pilou.’