Come, you can write historical
memoirs, a work of art such as never was, since Diderot once wrote six
sermons for a hundred crowns!'
"'After all,' I said, in agitation, 'I cannot choose but do it. So,
my dear friend, my thanks are due to you. I shall be quite rich with
twenty-five louis.'
"'Richer than you think,' he laughed. 'If I have my commission from
Finot in this matter, it goes to you, can't you see? Now let us go to
the Bois de Boulogne,' he said; 'we shall see your countess there, and
I will show you the pretty little widow that I am to marry--a charming
woman, an Alsacienne, rather plump. She reads Kant, Schiller, Jean
Paul, and a host of lachrymose books. She has a mania for continually
asking my opinion, and I have to look as if I entered into all this
German sensibility, and to know a pack of ballads--drugs, all of them,
that my doctor absolutely prohibits. As yet I have not been able to
wean her from her literary enthusiasms; she sheds torrents of tears as
she reads Goethe, and I have to weep a little myself to please her,
for she has an income of fifty thousand livres, my dear boy, and the
prettiest little hand and foot in the world. Oh, if she would only say
_mon ange_ and _brouiller_ instead of _mon anche_ and _prouiller_, she
would be perfection!'
"We saw the countess, radiant amid the splendors of her equipage.
Pages:
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198