“Well!” Ernest asked boldly, “and
what about the Marquis?” “He left very
early,” Sonia replied. “A queer sort
of marquis, I must say!” Ernest observed contemptuously,
and growing bolder. “Why, I should like
to know?” Sonia replied, drawing herself up.
“The man has his own habits, I suppose!”
“Do you know, Madame,” Sabina observed,
“that he came back half an hour after he left?”
“Ah!” Sonia said, getting up and walking
about the room. “He came back? What
did he want, I wonder?” “He did not say,
Madame. He merely went upstairs to see you.
He was dressed in his old clothes again.”
And suddenly Sonia uttered a loud cry, and clapped
her hands, and the seven came round to see what had
caused her emotion. “Look here! Just
look here!” she cried. “Do look on
the mantel-piece! It is really charming!
Do look!”
And with a smiling, and yet somewhat melancholy expression
in her eyes, with a tender look which they could not
understand, she showed them a small bunch of wild
flowers, by the side of a heap of half-pennies.
Mechanically she took them up and counted them, and
then began to cry.
There were forty-seven of them.
On a hot afternoon during last summer, the large auction
rooms seemed asleep, and the auctioneers were knocking
down the various lots in a listless manner. In
a back room, on the first floor, two or three lots
of old silk, ecclesiastical vestments, were lying in
a corner.
They were copes for solemn occasions, and graceful
chasubles on which embroidered flowers surrounded
symbolic letters on a yellowish ground, which had
become cream-colored, although it had originally been
white. Some second-hand dealers were there, two
or three men with dirty beards, and a fat woman with
a big stomach, one of those women who deal in second-hand
finery, and who also manage illicit love affairs, who
are brokers in old and young human flesh, just as
much as they are in new and old clothes.
Presently a beautiful Louis XV. chasuble was put up
for sale, which was as pretty as the dress of a marchioness
of that period; it had retained all its colors, and
was embroidered with lilies of the valley round the
cross, and long blue iris, which came up to the foot
of the sacred emblem, and wreaths of roses in the
corners. When I had bought it, I noticed that
there was a faint scent about it, as if it were permeated
with the remains of incense, or rather, as if it were
still pervaded by those delicate, sweet scents of
by-gone years, which seemed to be only the memory
of perfumes, the soul of evaporated essences.
When I got it home, I wished to have a small chair
of the same period covered with it; and as I was handling
it in order to take the necessary measures, I felt
some paper beneath my fingers, and when I cut the
lining, some letters fell at my feet. They were
yellow with age, and the faint ink was the color of
rust, and outside the sheet, which was folded in the
fashion of years long past, it was addressed in a delicate
hand: To Monsieur l’Abbe d’Argence
