第88章
coquettish cap the face of a monkey of extreme ugliness, on which a flat nose, fleshless as that of Death, is separated by a strong hairy line from a mouth filled with false teeth, whence issue sounds like the confused clacking of hunting-horns, you will have some difficulty in understanding why the leading society of Soulanges (all the town, in fact) thought this quasi-queen a beauty,--unless, indeed, you remember the succinct statement recently made "ex professo," by one of the cleverest women of our time, on the art of making her sex beautiful by surrounding accessories.
As to accessories, in the first place, Madame Soudry was surrounded by the magnificent gifts accumulated by her late mistress, which the ex-
Benedictine called "fructus belli." Then she made the most of her ugliness by exaggerating it, and by assuming that indescribable air and manner which belongs only to Parisian women, the secret of which is known even to the most vulgar among them,--who are always more or less mimics.She laced tight, wore an enormous bustle, also diamond earrings, and her fingers were covered with rings.At the top of her corsage, between two mounds of flesh well plastered with pearl-white, shone a beetle made of topaz with a diamond head, the gift of dear mistress,--a jewel renowned throughout the department.Like the late dear mistress, she wore short sleeves and bare arms, and flirted an ivory fan, painted by Boucher with two little rose-diamonds in the handle.
When she went out Madame Soudry carried a parasol of the true eighteenth-century style; that is to say, a tall cane at the end of which opened a green sun-shade with a green fringe.When she walked about the terrace a stranger on the high-road, seeing her from afar, might have thought her one of Watteau's dames.
In her salon, hung with red damask, with curtains of the same lined with silk, a fire on the hearth, a mantel-shelf adorned with bibelots of the good time of Louis XV., and bearing candelabra in the form of lilies upheld by Cupids--in this salon, filled with furniture in gilded wood of the "pied de biche" pattern, it is not impossible to understand why the people of Soulanges called the mistress of the house, "The beautiful Madame Soulanges." The mansion had actually become the civic pride of this capital of a canton.
If the leading society of the little town believed in its queen, the queen as surely believed in herself.By a phenomenon not in the least rare, which the vanity of mothers and authors carries on at all moments under our very eyes in behalf of their literary works or their marriageable daughters, the late Mademoiselle Cochet was, at the end of seven years, so completely buried under Madame Soudry, the mayoress, that she not only did not remember her past, but she actually believed herself a well-bred woman.She had studied the airs and graces, the dulcet tones, the gestures, the ways of her mistress, so long that when she found herself in the midst of an opulence of her own she was able to practice the natural insolence of it.She knew her eighteenth century, and the tales of its great lords and all their belongings, by heart.This back-stairs erudition gave to her conversation a flavor of "oeil-de-boeuf"; her soubrette gossip passed muster for courtly wit.Morally, the mayoress was, if you wish to say so, tinsel; but to savages paste diamonds are as good as real ones.
The woman found herself courted and worshipped by the society in which she lived, just as her mistress had been worshipped in former days.
She gave weekly dinners, with coffee and liqueurs to those who came in after the dessert.No female head could have resisted the exhilarating force of such continual adulation.In winter the warm salon, always well-lighted with wax candles, was well-filled with the richest people of Soulanges, who paid for the good liqueurs and the fine wines which came from dear mistress's cellars, with flatteries to their hostess.
These visitors and their wives had a life-interest, as it were, in this luxury; which was to them a saving of lights and fuel.Thus it came to pass that in a circuit of fifteen miles and even as far as Ville-aux-Fayes, every voice was ready to declare: "Madame Soudry does the honors admirably.She keeps open house; every one enjoys her salon; she knows how to carry herself and her fortune; she always says the witty thing, she makes you laugh.And what splendid silver! There is not another house like it short of Paris--"
The silver had been given to Mademoiselle Laguerre by Bouret.It was a magnificent service made by the famous Germain, and Madame Soudry had literally stolen it.At Mademoiselle Laguerre's death she merely took it into her own room, and the heirs, who knew nothing of the value of their inheritance, never claimed it.
For some time past the twelve or fifteen personages who composed the leading society of Soulanges spoke of Madame Soudry as the INTIMATE
FRIEND of Mademoiselle Laguerre, recoiling at the term "waiting-
woman," and making believe that she had sacrificed herself to the singer as her friend and companion.
Strange yet true! all these illusions became realities, and spread even to the actual regions of the heart; Madame Soudry reigned supreme, in a way, over her husband.
The gendarme, required to love a woman ten years older than himself who kept the management of her fortune in her own hands, behaved to her in the spirit of the ideas she had ended by adopting about her beauty.But sometimes, when persons envied him or talked to him of his happiness, he wished they were in his place, for, to hide his peccadilloes, he was forced to take as many precautions as the husband of a young and adoring wife; and it was not until very recently that he had been able to introduce into the family a pretty servant-girl.