Chapter 3 - Page 2

getting unpunctual. Can it be that the fashion of
dissipation is contagious? I see that Monsieur le chevalier is again
at Les Touches this evening."

"Don't say anything about those visits before Mademoiselle de
Pen-Hoel," cried the old maid, eagerly.

"Ah! mademoiselle," remarked Mariotte, "you can't prevent the town
from gossiping."

"What do they say?" asked the baroness.

"The young girls and the old women all say that he is in love with
Mademoiselle des Touches."

"A lad of Calyste's make is playing his proper part in making the
women love him," said the baron.

"Here comes Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel," said Mariotte.

The gravel in the court-yard crackled under the discreet footsteps of
the coming lady, who was accompanied by a page supplied with a
lantern. Seeing this lad, Mariotte removed her stool to the great hall
for the purpose of talking with him by the gleam of his rush-light,
which was burned at the cost of his rich and miserly mistress, thus
economizing those of her own masters.

This elderly demoiselle was a thin, dried-up old maid, yellow as the
parchment of a Parliament record, wrinkled as a lake ruffled by the
wind, with gray eyes, large prominent teeth, and the hands of a man.
She was rather short, a little crooked, possibly hump-backed; but no
one had ever been inquisitive enough to ascertain the nature of her
perfections or her imperfections. Dressed in the same style as
Mademoiselle du Guenic, she stirred an enormous quantity of petticoats
and linen whenever she wanted to find one or other of the two
apertures of her gown through which she reached her pockets. The
strangest jingling of keys and money then echoed among her garments.
She always wore, dangling from one side, the bunch of keys of a good
housekeeper, and from the other her silver snuff-box, thimble,
knitting-needles, and other implements that were also resonant.
Instead of Mademoiselle Zephirine's wadded hood, she wore a green
bonnet, in which she may have visited her melons, for it had passed,
like them, from green to yellowish; as for its shape, our present
fashions are just now bringing it back to Paris, after twenty years
absence, under the name of Bibi. This bonnet was constructed under her
own eye and by the hands of her nieces, out of green Florence silk
bought at Guerande, and an old bonnet-shape, renewed every five years
at Nantes,--for Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel allowed her bonnets the
longevity of a legislature. Her nieces also made her gowns, cut by an
immutable pattern. The old lady still used the cane with the short
hook that all women carried in the early days of Marie-Antoinette. She
belonged to