" 'Taking all this into consideration, M.le President, and the affidavits subjoined, the petitioner desires that it may please you, inasmuch as the foregoing facts sufficiently prove the insanity and incompetency of the Marquis d'Espard herein described with his titles and residence, to order that, to the end that he may be declared incompetent by law, this petition and the documents in evidence may be laid before the King's public prosecutor; and that you will charge one of the judges of this Court to make his report to you on any day you may be pleased to name, and thereupon to pronounce judgment,' etc.
"And here," said Popinot, "is the President's order instructing me!--Well, what does the Marquise d'Espard want with me? I know everything.
But I shall go to-morrow with my registrar to see M.le Marquis, for this does not seem at all clear to me.""Listen, my dear uncle, I have never asked the least little favor of you that had to do with your legal functions; well, now I beg you to show Madame d'Espard the kindness which her situation deserves.If she came here, you would listen to her?""Yes."
"Well, then, go and listen to her in her own house.Madame d'Espard is a sickly, nervous, delicate woman, who would faint in your rat-hole of a place.Go in the evening, instead of accepting her dinner, since the law forbids your eating or drinking at your client's expense.""And does not the law forbid you from taking any legacy from your dead?" said Popinot, fancying that he saw a touch of irony on his nephew's lips.
"Come, uncle, if it were only to enable you to get at the truth of this business, grant my request.You will come as the examining judge, since matters do not seem to you very clear.Deuce take it! It is as necessary to cross-question the Marquise as it is to examine the Marquis.""You are right," said the lawyer."It is quite possible that it is she who is mad.I will go.""I will call for you.Write down in your engagement book: 'To-morrow evening at nine, Madame d'Espard.'--Good!" said Bianchon, seeing his uncle make a note of the engagement.
Next evening at nine Bianchon mounted his uncle's dusty staircase, and found him at work on the statement of some complicated judgment.The coat Lavienne had ordered of the tailor had not been sent, so Popinot put on his old stained coat, and was the Popinot unadorned whose appearance made those laugh who did not know the secrets of his private life.Bianchon, however, obtained permission to pull his cravat straight, and to button his coat, and he hid the stains by crossing the breast of it with the right side over the left, and so displaying the new front of the cloth.But in a minute the judge rucked the coat up over his chest by the way in which he stuffed his hands into his pockets, obeying an irresistible habit.Thus the coat, deeply wrinkled both in front and behind, made a sort of hump in the middle of the back, leaving a gap between the waistcoat and trousers through which his shirt showed.Bianchon, to his sorrow, only discovered this crowning absurdity at the moment when his uncle entered the Marquise's room.
A brief sketch of the person and the career of the lady in whose presence the doctor and the judge now found themselves is necessary for an understanding of her interview with Popinot.
Madame d'Espard had, for the last seven years, been very much the fashion in Paris, where Fashion can raise and drop by turns various personages who, now great and now small, that is to say, in view or forgotten, are at last quite intolerable--as discarded ministers are, and every kind of decayed sovereignty.These flatterers of the past, odious with their stale pretensions, know everything, speak ill of everything, and, like ruined profligates, are friends with all the world.Since her husband had separated from her in 1815, Madame d'Espard must have married in the beginning of 1812.Her children, therefore, were aged respectively fifteen and thirteen.By what luck was the mother of a family, about three-and-thirty years of age, still the fashion?
Though Fashion is capricious, and no one can foresee who shall be her favorites, though she often exalts a banker's wife, or some woman of very doubtful elegance and beauty, it certainly seems supernatural when Fashion puts on constitutional airs and gives promotion for age.
But in this case Fashion had done as the world did, and accepted Madame d'Espard as still young.
The Marquise, who was thirty-three by her register of birth, was twenty-two in a drawing-room in the evening.But by what care, what artifice! Elaborate curls shaded her temples.She condemned herself to live in twilight, affecting illness so as to sit under the protecting tones of light filtered through muslin.Like Diane de Poitiers, she used cold water in her bath, and, like her again, the Marquise slept on a horse-hair mattress, with morocco-covered pillows to preserve her hair; she ate very little, only drank water, and observed monastic regularity in the smallest actions of her life.
