PAGE 6
A Prince Of Bohemia
by
” ‘Oh! no.’
“At that La Palferine and a friend who happened to be with him went downstairs with the poor soul, and insisted on putting him into the carriage. It was raining in torrents. La Palferine had thought of everything. He offered to drive the official to the next house on his list; and when the almoner came down again, he found the carriage waiting for him at the door. The man in livery handed him a note written in pencil:
” ‘The carriage has been engaged for three days. Count Rusticoli de la Palferine is too happy to associate himself with Court charities by lending wings to Royal beneficence.’
“La Palferine now calls the civil list the uncivil list.
“He was once passionately loved by a lady of somewhat light conduct. Antonia lived in the Rue du Helder; she had seen and been seen to some extent, but at the time of her acquaintance with La Palferine she had not yet ‘an establishment.’ Antonia was not wanting in the insolence of old days, now degenerating into rudeness among women of her class. After a fortnight of unmixed bliss, she was compelled, in the interest of her civil list, to return to a less exclusive system; and La Palferine, discovering a certain lack of sincerity in her dealings with him, sent Madame Antonia a note which made her famous.
” ‘MADAME,–Your conduct causes me much surprise and no less distress. Not content with rending my heart with your disdain, you have been so little thoughtful as to retain a toothbrush, which my means will not permit me to replace, my estates being mortgaged beyond their value.
” ‘Adieu, too fair and too ungrateful friend! May we meet again in a better world.
” ‘CHARLES EDWARD.’
“Assuredly (to avail ourselves yet further of Sainte-Beuve’s Babylonish dialect), this far outpasses the raillery of Sterne’s /Sentimental Journey/; it might be Scarron without his grossness. Nay, I do not know but that Moliere in his lighter mood would not have said of it, as of Cyrano de Bergerac’s best–‘This is mine.’ Richelieu himself was not more complete when he wrote to the princess waiting for him in the Palais Royal–‘Stay there, my queen, to charm the scullion lads.’ At the same time, Charles Edward’s humor is less biting. I am not sure that this kind of wit was known among the Greeks and Romans. Plato, possibly, upon a closer inspection approaches it, but from the austere and musical side–“
“No more of that jargon,” the Marquise broke in, “in print it may be endurable; but to have it grating upon my ears is a punishment which I do not in the least deserve.”
“He first met Claudine on this wise,” continued Nathan. “It was one of the unfilled days, when Youth is a burden to itself; days when youth, reduced by the overweening presumption of Age to a condition of potential energy and dejection, emerges therefrom (like Blondet under the Restoration), either to get into mischief or to set about some colossal piece of buffoonery, half excused by the very audacity of its conception. La Palferine was sauntering, cane in hand, up and down the pavement between the Rue de Grammont and the Rue de Richelieu, when in the distance he descried a woman too elegantly dressed, covered, as he phrased it, with a great deal of portable property, too expensive and too carelessly worn for its owner to be other than a princess of the court or of the stage, it was not easy at first to say which. But after July 1830, in his opinion, there is no mistaking the indications –the princess can only be a princess of the stage.
“The Count came up and walked by her side as if she had given him an assignation. He followed her with a courteous persistence, a persistence in good taste, giving the lady from time to time, and always at the right moment, an authoritative glance, which compelled her to submit to his escort. Anybody but La Palferine would have been frozen by his reception, and disconcerted by the lady’s first efforts to rid herself of her cavalier, by her chilly air, her curt speeches; but no gravity, with all the will in the world, could hold out long against La Palferine’s jesting replies. The fair stranger went into her milliner’s shop. Charles Edward followed, took a seat, and gave his opinions and advice like a man that meant to pay. This coolness disturbed the lady. She went out.