"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 naïve 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 Opéra 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 naïve, "Mon Dieu!" she said, "Fifty years since Arsène 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 Aglæ 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