Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 1).djvu/84

64 proposed the health of King Louis XVIII. He was the Marquis de Saint-Méran. This toast, recalling at once the patient exile of Hartwell and the king and pacificator of France, excited great applause; glasses were elevated in the air à l'Anglaise, and the ladies, detaching their bouquets, strewed the table with them. In a word, poetical enthusiasm prevailed.

"Ah! they would own, were they here," said the Marquise de Saint-Méran, a woman with a hard eye, thin lips, and aristocratic mien, though still elegant-looking, despite her fifty years—"ah! these revolutionists, who drove us out, and whom we leave now in our turn to conspire at their ease in the old chateaux which they purchased for a mere trifle during the Reign of Terror, would be compelled to own, were they here, that all true devotion was on our side, since we attached ourselves to a falling monarch, while they, on the contrary, worshiped the rising sun, and made their fortunes while we lost ours. Yes, yes, they could not help admitting that the king, our king, was in truth 'Louis the well-beloved,' while their emperor was never anything but 'Napoleon the accursed.' Am I not right, Villefort?"

"I beg your pardon, madame, but—in truth—I was not attending to the conversation."

"Marquise, marquise!" interposed the same elderly personage who had proposed the toast, "let the young people alone; on their wedding day they naturally have to speak of something else than politics."

"Pardon me, dearest mother," said a young and lovely girl, with a profusion of light brown hair, and eyes that seemed to float in liquid crystal, "I yield to you M. de Villefort, whom I had seized for a moment. M. Villefort, my mother speaks to you."

"If Madame la Marquise will deign to repeat the words I but imperfectly caught, I shall be delighted to answer," said M. de Villefort.

"Never mind, Renée," replied the marquise, with such a look of tenderness as all were astonished to see on her harsh features; for a woman's heart is so constituted that, however withered it be by the blasts of prejudice and etiquette, there is always one spot fertile and smiling, the spot consecrated by God to maternal love. "I forgive you. What I was saying, Villefort, was, that the Bonapartists had neither our sincerity, enthusiasm, nor devotion."

They had, however, what supplied the place of those fine qualities," replied the young man, "and that was fanaticism. Napoleon is the Mahomet of the West, and is worshiped by his commonplace but ambitious followers, not only as a leader and lawgiver, but also as a type, as the personification of equality."

"Of equality!" cried the marquise, "Napoleon the type of equality!