VII

Summary

IT may as well be said at once that it was eventually carried out, and that in the course of a fortnight old Mr. Probert and his daughters alighted successively at the Hôtel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham. Francie's visit with her intended to Mme. de Brécourt bore exactly the fruit the young man had foreseen and was followed the very next day by a call from this lady. She took Francie out with her in her carriage and kept her the whole afternoon, driving her over half Paris, chattering with her, kissing her, delighting in her, telling her they were already sisters, paying her compliments which made the girl envy her art of beautiful expression. After she had carried her home the countess rushed off to her father’s, reflecting with pleasure that at that hour she should probably find her sister Marguerite there. Mme. de Cliché was with the old man in fact (she had three days in the week for coming to the Cours la Reine); she sat near himin the firelight, telling him presumably her troubles; for Maxime de Cliché was not quite the pearl that they originally had supposed. Mme. de Brécourt knew what Marguerite did whenever she took that little ottoman and drew it close to her father's chair: she gave way to her favourite vice, that of dolefulness, which lengthened her long face more; it was unbecoming, if she only knew it. The family was intensely united, as we know; but that did not prevent Mme. de Brécourt's having a certain sympathy for Maxime: he too was one of themselves and she asked herself what she would have done if she had been a well-constituted man with a wife whose cheeks were like decks in a high sea. It was the twilight hour in the winter days, before the lamps, that especially brought her out; then she began her plaintive, complicated stories, to which her father listened with such angelic patience. Mme. de Brécourt liked his particular room in the old house in the Cours la Reine; it reminded her of her mother's life and her young days and her dead brother and the feelings connected with her first going into the world.