Chapter 7 - Page 2

shed gallons of tears--Mr.
Probert went to see the Dossons with his son. Mme. de Brecourt paid them
another visit, a real official affair as she deemed it, accompanied by
her husband; and the Baron de Douves and his wife, written to by Gaston,
by his father and by Margaret and Susan, came up from the country full
of anxious participation. M. de Douves was the person who took the
family, all round, most seriously and who most deprecated any sign of
crude or precipitate action. He was a very small black gentleman with
thick eyebrows and high heels--in the country and the mud he wore sabots
with straw in them--who was suspected by his friends of believing that
he looked like Louis XIV. It is perhaps a proof that something of the
quality of this monarch was really recognised in him that no one had
ever ventured to clear up this point by a question. "La famille c'est
moi" appeared to be his tacit formula, and he carried his umbrella--he
had very bad ones, Gaston thought--with something of a sceptral air.
Mme. de Brecourt went so far as to believe that his wife, in
confirmation of this, took herself for a species of Mme. de Maintenon:
she had lapsed into a provincial existence as she might have harked back
to the seventeenth century; the world she lived in seemed about as far
away. She was the largest, heaviest member of the family, and in the
Vendee was thought majestic despite the old clothes she fondly affected
and which added to her look of having come down from a remote past or
reverted to it. She was at bottom an excellent woman, but she wrote roy
and foy like her husband, and the action of her mind was wholly
restricted to questions of relationship and alliance. She had
extraordinary patience of research and tenacity of grasp for a clue, and
viewed people solely in the light projected upon them by others; that is
not as good or wicked, ugly or handsome, wise or foolish, but as
grandsons, nephews, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters-in-law,
cousins and second cousins. You might have supposed, to listen to her,
that human beings were susceptible of no attribute but that of a
dwindling or thickening consanguinity. There was a certain expectation
that she would leave rather formidable memoirs. In Mme. de Brecourt's
eyes this pair were very shabby, they didn't payer de mine--they fairly
smelt of their province; "but for the reality of the thing," she often
said to herself, "they're worth all of us. We're diluted and they're
pure, and any one with an eye would see it." "The thing" was the
legitimist principle, the ancient faith and even a little the right, the
unconscious, grand air.

The Marquis de Cliche did his duty with his wife, who mopped the decks,
as Susan said,