



Produced by David Widger






"LE MONSIEUR DE LA PETITE DAME"

By Frances Hodgson Burnett

Copyright, 1877


It was Madame who first entered the box, and Madame was bright with
youthful bloom, bright with jewels, and, moreover, a beauty. She was
a little creature, with childishly large eyes, a low, white forehead,
reddish-brown hair, and Greek nose and mouth.

"Clearly," remarked the old lady in the box opposite, "not a
Frenchwoman. Her youth is too girlish, and she has too petulant an air
of indifference."

This old lady in the box opposite was that venerable and somewhat severe
aristocrat, Madame de Castro, and having gazed for a moment or so a
little disapprovingly at the new arrival, she turned her glasses to the
young beauty's companion and uttered an exclamation.

It was at Monsieur she was looking now. Monsieur had followed his wife
closely, bearing her fan and bouquet and wrap, and had silently seated
him self a little behind her and in the shadow.

"_Ciel!_" cried Madame de Castro, "what an ugly little man!"

It was not an unnatural exclamation. Fate had not been so kind to the
individual referred to as she might have been--in fact she had been
definitely cruel. He was small of figure, insignificant, dark, and wore
a patient sphynx-like air of gravity. He did not seem to speak or move,
simply sat in the shadow holding his wife's belongings, apparently
almost entirely unnoticed by her.

"I don't know him at all," said Madame de Castro; "though that is not to
be wondered at, since I have exiled myself long enough to forget and be
forgotten by half Paris. What is his name?"

The gentleman at her side--a distinguished-looking old young man, with a
sarcastic smile--began with the smile, and ended with a half laugh.

"They call him," he replied, "Le Monsieur de la petite Dame. His name is
Villefort."

"Le Monsieur de la petite Dame," repeated Madame, testily. "That is
a title of new Paris--the Paris of your Americans and English. It is
villainously ill-bred."

M. Renard's laugh receded into the smile again, and the smile became of
double significance.

"True," he acquiesced, "but it is also villainously apropos. Look for
yourself."

Madame did so, and her next query, after she had dropped her glass
again, was a sharp one.

"Who is she--the wife?"

"She is what you are pleased to call one of our Americans! You know
the class,"--with a little wave of the hand,--"rich, unconventional,
comfortable people, who live well and dress well, and have an
incomprehensibly _naive_ way of going to impossible places and doing
impossible things by way of enjoyment. Our fair friend there, for
instance, has probably been round the world upon several occasions,
and is familiar with a number of places and objects of note fearful
to contemplate. They came here as tourists, and became fascinated with
European life. The most overwhelming punishment which could be inflicted
upon that excellent woman, the mother, would be that she should be
compelled to return to her New York, or Philadelphia, or Boston,
whichsoever it may be."

"Humph!" commented Madame. "But you have not told me the name."

"Madame Villefort's? No, not yet. It was Trent--Mademoiselle Bertha
Trent."

"She is not twenty yet," said Madame, in a queer, grumbling tone. "What
did she marry that man for?"

"God knows," replied M. Renard, not too devoutly, "Paris does not."

For some reason best known to herself, Madame de Castro looked angry.
She was a shrewd old person, with strong whims of her own, even at
seventy. She quite glared at the pretty American from under her bushy
eyebrows.

"Le Monsieur de la petite Dame!" she fumed. "I tell you it is low--_low_
to give a man such names."

"Oh!" returned Renard, shrugging his shoulders, "we did not give it to
him. It was an awkward servant who dubbed him so at first. She was new
to her position, and forgot his name, and being asked who had arrived,
stumbled upon this _bon mot: 'Un monsieur, Madame--le monsieur de la
petite dame,'_--and, being repeated and tossed lightly from hand to
hand, it has become at last an established witticism, albeit bandied
under breath."

It was characteristic of the august De Castro that during the remainder
of the evening's entertainment she should occupy herself more with her
neighbors than with the opera. She aroused M. Renard to a secret ecstasy
of mirth by the sharp steadiness of her observation of the inmates of
the box opposite to them. She talked about them, too, in a tone not too
well modulated, criticising the beautifully dressed little woman,
her hair, her eyes, her Greek nose and mouth, and, more than all, her
indifferent expression and her manner of leaning upon the edge of her
box and staring at the stage as if she did not care for, and indeed
scarcely saw, what was going on upon it.

"That is the way with your American beauties," she said. "They have no
respect for things. Their people spoil them--their men especially.
They consider themselves privileged to act as their whims direct. They
have not the gentle timidity of Frenchwomen. What French girl would have
the _sang froid_ to sit in one of the best boxes of the Nouvelle Opera
and regard, with an actual air of _ennui_, such a performance as this?
She does not hear a word that is sung."

"And we--do we hear?" bantered M. Renard.

"_Pouf!_" cried Madame. "We! We are world-dried and weather-beaten. We
have not a worm-eaten emotion between us. I am seventy, and you, who are
thirty-five, are the elder of the two. Bah! At that girl's age I had
the heart of a dove."

"But that is long ago," murmured M. Renard, as if to himself. It
was quite human that he should slightly resent being classed with an
unamiable grenadier of seventy.

"Yes!" with considerable asperity. "Fifty years!" Then, with harsh
voice and withered face melted suddenly into softness quite _naive, "Mon
Dieu!_" she said, "Fifty years since Arsene whispered into my ear at my
first opera, that he saw tears in my eyes!"

It was at this instant that there appeared in the Villefort box a new
figure,--that of a dark, slight young man of graceful movements,--in
fact, a young man of intensely striking appearance. M. Villefort rose
to receive him with serious courtesy, but the pretty American was not so
gracious. Not until he had seated himself at her side and spoken to her
did she turn her head and permit her eyes simply to rest upon his face.

M. Renard smiled again.

"Enter," he remarked in a low tone,--"enter M. Ralph Edmondstone, the
cousin of Madame."

His companion asked no questions, but he proceeded, returning to his
light and airy tone:--

"M. Ralph Edmondstone is a genius," he said. "He is an artist, he is a
poet, he is also a writer of subtile prose. His sonnets to Euphrasie--in
the day of Euphrasie--awakened the admiration of the sternest critics:
they were so tender, so full of purest fire! Some of the same critics
also could scarcely choose between these and his songs to Aglae in
her day, or Camille in hers. He is a young man of fine fancies, and
possesses the amiable quality of being invariably passionately in
earnest. As he was serious in his sentiments yesterday, so he will be
to-morrow, so he is to-day."

"To-day!" echoed Madame de Castro. "Nonsense!"

Madame Villefort did not seem to talk much. It was M. Ralph Edmondstone
who conversed, and that, too, with so much of the charm of animation
that it was pleasurable even to be a mere looker-on.

One involuntarily strained one's ears to catch a sentence,--he was
so eagerly absorbed, so full of rapid, gracefully unconscious and
unconventional gesture.

"I wonder what he is saying?" Madame de Castro was once betrayed into
exclaiming.

"Something metaphysical, about a poem, or a passage of music, or a
picture,--or perhaps his soul," returned M. Renard. "His soul is his
strong point,--he pets it and wonders at it. He puts it through its
paces. And yet, singularly enough, he is never ridiculous--only fanciful
and _naive_. It is his soul which so fascinates women."

Whether this last was true of other women or not, Madame Villefort
scarcely appeared fascinated. As she listened, her eyes still rested
upon his eager mobile face, but with a peculiar expression,--an
expression of critical attention, and yet one which somehow detracted
from her look of youth, as if she weighed his words as they fell from
his lips and classified them, without any touch of the enthusiasm which
stirred within himself.

Suddenly she rose from her seat ana addressed her husband, who
immediately rose also. Then she spoke to M. Edmondstone, and without
more ado, the three left the box,--the young beauty, a little oddly,
rather followed than accompanied by her companions,--at the recognition
of which circumstance Madame de Castro uttered a series of sharp
ejaculations of disapproval.

"Bah! Bah!" she cried. "She is too young for such airs!--as if she were
Madame l'Imperatrice herself! Take me to my carriage. I am tired also."

Crossing the pavement with M. Renard, they passed the carriage of the
Villeforts. Before its open door stood M. Villefort and Edmondstone, and
the younger man, with bared head, bent forward speaking to his cousin.

"If I come to-morrow," he was saying, "you will be at home, Bertha?"

"Yes."

"Then, good-night,"--holding out his hand,--"only I wish so that
you would go to the Aylmers instead of home. That _protegee_ of Mrs.
Aylmer's--the little singing girl--would touch your heart with her
voice. On hearing her, one thinks at once of some shy wild bird high in
a clear sky,--far enough above earth to have forgotten to be timid."

"Yes," came quietly from the darkness within the carriage; "but I am too
tired to care about voices just now. Good-night, Ralph!"

M. Renard's reply of "God knows, Paris does not," to Madame de Castro's
query as to why Madame Villefort had married her husband, contained an
element of truth, and yet there were numbers of Parisian-Americans, more
especially the young, well-looking, and masculine, who at the time
the marriage had taken place had been ready enough with sardonic
explanations.

"There are women who are avaricious enough to sell their souls," they
cried; "and the maternal Trent is one of them. The girl is only to blame
for allowing herself to be bullied into the match."

"But the weak place in this argument," said M. Renard, "is, that the
people are too rich to be greatly influenced by money. If there had been
a title,--but there was no title."

Neither did Bertha Trent comport herself like a cowed creature. She took
her place in society as Madame Villefort in such a manner as could give
rise to no comment whatever; only one or two of the restless inquisitive
wondered if they had not been, mistaken in her. She was, as I have said
already, a childishly small and slight creature,--the kind of woman to
touch one with suggestions of helplessness and lack of will; and yet,
notwithstanding this, a celebrated artist--a shrewd, worldly-wise old
fellow--who had painted her portrait, had complained that he was not
satisfied with it because he had not done justice to "the obstinate
endurance in her eye."

It was to her cousin, Ralph Edmondstone, he had said this with some
degree of testiness, and Edmondstone had smiled and answered:--

"What! have you found that out? Few people do."

At the time of the marriage Edmondstone had been in Rome singeing his
wings in the light of the eyes of a certain Marchesa who was his latest
poetic passion. She was not his first fancy, nor would she be his last,
but she had power enough for the time being to have satisfied the most
exacting of women.

He was at his banker's when he heard the news spoken of as the latest
item from American Paris, and his start and exclamation of disgust drew
forth some cynical after-comment from men who envied him.

"Who?" he said, with indiscreet impatience. "That undersized sphynx of a
Villefort? Faugh!"

But insignificant though he might be, it was M. Villefort who had
won, and if he was nothing more, he was at least a faithful attendant.
Henceforth, those who saw his wife invariably saw him also,--driving
with her in her carriage, riding with her courageously if ungracefully,
standing or seated near her in the shadow of her box at the Nouvelle
Opera, silent, impassive, grave, noticeable only through the contrast he
afforded to her girlish beauty and bloom.

"Always there!" commented a sharp American belle of mature years, "like
an ugly little conscience."

Edmondstone's first meeting with his cousin after his return to Paris
was accidental. He had rather put off visiting her, and one night,
entering a crowded room, he found himself standing behind a girl's light
figure and staring at an abundance of reddish-brown hair. When, almost
immediately the pretty head to which this hair belonged turned with
a slow, yet involuntary-looking movement toward him, he felt that he
became excited without knowing why.

"Ah, Bertha!" he exclaimed.

She smiled a little and held out her hand, and he immediately became
conscious of M. Villefort being quite