Page:Ten Years Later.djvu/18

8 CHAPTER II.

A LOVER AND A MISTRESS.

the wax-lights were burning in the castle of Blois, around the inanimate body of Gaston of Orleans, that last representative of the past; while the bourgeois of the city were making his epitaph, which was far from being a panegyric; while madame the dowager, no longer remembering that in her young days she had loved that senseless corpse to such a degree as to fly the paternal palace for his sake, was making, within twenty paces of the funeral apartment, her little calculations of interest and her little sacrifices of pride, other interests and other prides were in agitation in all the parts of the castle into which a living soul could penetrate. Neither the lugubrious sounds of the beils, nor the voices of the chanters, nor the splendor of the wax-lights through the windows, nor the preparations for the funeral, had the power to divert the attention of two persons, placed at a window of the interior court — a window that we are acquainted with, and which lightened a chamber forming part of what were called the little apartments. For the rest, a joyous beam of the sun, for the sun appeared to care very little for the loss France had just suffered — a sunbeam, we say, descended upon them, drawing perfumes from the neighboring flowers, and animating the walls themselves. These two persons, so occupied, not by the death of the duke, but by the conversation which was the consequence of that death, these two persons were a young woman and a young man. The latter personage, a man of from twenty-five to twenty-six years of age, with a mien sometimes lively and sometimes dull, making good use of two immensely large eyes shaded with long eyelashes, was short of stature and brown of skin; he smiled with an enormous but well-furnished mouth, and his pointed chin, which appeared to enjoy a mobility which nature does not ordinarily grant to that portion of the countenance, leaned from time to time very lovingly toward his interlocutrix, who, we must say, did not always draw back so rapidly as strict propriety had a right to require. The young girl — we know her, for we have already seen her at that very same window by the light of that same sun — the young girl presented a singular mixture of slyness and reflection; she was charming when she laughed, beautiful when she became serious; but,