Years passed, however, without disuniting them.
The chain wherewith she had attached him to her was
heavy, and she made new links as the old ones wore
away. But, always solicitous, she watched over
the painter’s heart as one guards a child crossing
a street full of vehicles, and day by day she lived
in expectation of the unknown danger, the dread of
which always hung over her.
The Count, without suspicion or jealousy, found this
intimacy of his wife with a famous and popular artist
a perfectly natural thing. Through continually
meeting, the two men, becoming accustomed to each other,
finally became excellent friends.
TWIN ROSES FROM A SINGLE STEM
When Bertin entered, on Friday evening, the house
of his friend, where he was to dine in honor of the
return of Antoinette de Guilleroy, he found in the
little Louis XV salon only Monsieur de Musadieu, who
had just arrived.
He was a clever old man, who perhaps might have become
of some importance, and who now could not console
himself for not having attained to something worth
while.
He had once been a commissioner of the imperial museums,
and had found means to get himself reappointed Inspector
of Fine Arts under the Republic, which did not prevent
him from being, above all else, the friend of princes,
of all the princes, princesses, and duchesses of European
aristocracy, and the sworn protector of artists of
all sorts. He was endowed with an alert mind
and quick perceptions, with great facility of speech
that enabled him to say agreeably the most ordinary
things, with a suppleness of thought that put him at
ease in any society, and a subtle diplomatic scent
that gave him the power to judge men at first sight;
and he strolled from salon to salon, morning and evening,
with his enlightened, useless, and gossiping activity.
Apt at everything, as he appeared, he would talk on
any subject with an air of convincing competence and
familiarity that made him greatly appreciated by fashionable
women, whom he served as a sort of traveling bazaar
of erudition. As a matter of fact, he knew many
things without ever having read any but the most indispensable
books; but he stood very well with the five Academies,
with all the savants, writers, and learned specialists,
to whom he listened with clever discernment. He
knew how to forget at once explanations that were
too technical or were useless to him, remembered the
others very well, and lent to the information thus
gleaned an easy, clear, and good-natured rendering
that made them as readily comprehensible as the popular
presentation of scientific facts. He gave the
impression of being a veritable storehouse of ideas,
one of those vast places wherein one never finds rare
objects but discovers a multiplicity of cheap productions
of all kinds and from all sources, from household
utensils to the popular instruments for physical culture
or for domestic surgery.
