And he rose.
"To Woman!" he said; "that enchanting sex to whom we owe our happiness,--not to speak of our mothers, our sisters, and our wives!"This toast excited general hilarity, and Colleville, already somewhat gay, exclaimed:--"Rascal! you have stolen my speech!"
The mayor then rose; profound silence reigned.
"Messieurs, our institutions! from which come the strength and grandeur of dynastic France!"The bottles disappeared amid a chorus of admiration as to the marvellous goodness and delicacy of their contents.
Celeste Colleville here said timidly:--"Mamma, will you permit me to give a toast?"
The good girl had noticed the dull, bewildered look of her godmother, neglected and forgotten,--she, the mistress of that house, wearing almost the expression of a dog that is doubtful which master to obey, looking from the face of her terrible sister-in-law to that of Thuillier, consulting each countenance, and oblivious of herself; but joy on the face of that poor helot, accustomed to be nothing, to repress her ideas, her feelings, had the effect of a pale wintry sun behind a mist; it barely lighted her faded, flabby flesh. The gauze cap trimmed with dingy flowers, the hair ill-dressed, the gloomy brown gown, with no ornament but a thick gold chain--all, combined with the expression of her countenance, stimulated the affection of the young Celeste, who--alone in the world--knew the value of that woman condemned to silence but aware of all about her, suffering from all yet consoling herself in God and in the girl who now was watching her.
"Yes, let the dear child give us her little toast," said la Peyrade to Madame Colleville.
"Go on, my daughter," cried Colleville; "here's the hermitage still to be drunk--and it's hoary with age," he added.
"To my kind godmother!" said the girl, lowering her glass respectfully before Madame Thuillier, and holding it towards her.
The poor woman, startled, looked through a veil of tears first at her husband, and then at Brigitte; but her position in the family was so well known, and the homage paid by innocence to weakness had something so beautiful about it, that the emotion was general; the men all rose and bowed to Madame Thuillier.
"Ah! Celeste, I would I had a kingdom to lay at your feet," murmured Felix Phellion.
The worthy Phellion wiped away a tear. Dutocq himself was moved.
"Oh! the charming child!" cried Mademoiselle Thuillier, rising, and going round to kiss her sister-in-law.
"My turn now!" said Colleville, posing like an athlete. "Now listen:
To friendship! Empty your glasses; refill your glasses. Good! To the fine arts,--the flower of social life! Empty your glasses; refill your glasses. To another such festival on the day after election!""What is that little bottle you have there?" said Dutocq to Mademoiselle Thuillier.
"That," she said, "is one of my three bottles of Madame Amphoux' liqueur; the second is for the day of Celeste's marriage; the third for the day on which her first child is baptized.""My sister is losing her head," remarked Thuillier to Colleville.
The dinner ended with a toast, offered by Thuillier, but suggested to him by Theodose at the moment when the malaga sparkled in the little glasses like so many rubies.
"Colleville, messieurs, has drunk to FRIENDSHIP. I now drink, in this most generous wine, To my friends!"An hurrah, full of heartiness, greeted that fine sentiment, but Dutocq remarked aside to Theodose:--"It is a shame to pour such wine down the throats of such people.""Ah! if we could only make such wine as that!" cried Zelie, making her glass ring by the way in which she sucked down the Spanish liquid.
"What fortunes we could get!"
Zelie had now reached her highest point of incandescence, and was really alarming.
"Yes," replied Minard, "but ours is made."
"Don't you think, sister," said Brigitte to Madame Thuillier, "that we had better take coffee in the salon?"Madame Thuillier obediently assumed the air of mistress of the house, and rose.
"Ah! you are a great wizard," said Flavie Colleville, accepting la Peyrade's arm to return to the salon.
"And yet I care only to bewitch you," he answered. "I think you more enchanting than ever this evening.""Thuillier," she said, to evade the subject, "Thuillier made to think himself a political character! oh! oh!""But, my dear Flavie, half the absurdities of life are the result of such conspiracies; and men are not alone in these deceptions. In how many families one sees the husband, children, and friends persuading a silly mother that she is a woman of sense, or an old woman of fifty that she is young and beautiful. Hence, inconceivable contrarieties for those who go about the world with their eyes shut. One man owes his ill-savored conceit to the flattery of a mistress; another owes his versifying vanity to those who are paid to call him a great poet.
Every family has its great man; and the result is, as we see it in the Chamber, general obscurity of the lights of France. Well, men of real mind are laughing to themselves about it, that's all. You are the mind and the beauty of this little circle of the petty bourgeoisie; it is this superiority which led me in the first instance to worship you. Ihave since longed to drag you out of it; for I love you sincerely--more in friendship than in love; though a great deal of love is gliding into it," he added, pressing her to his heart under cover of the recess of a window to which he had taken her.
"Madame Phellion will play the piano," cried Colleville. "We must all dance to-night--bottles and Brigitte's francs and all the little girls! I'll go and fetch my clarionet."He gave his empty coffee-cup to his wife, smiling to see her so friendly with la Peyrade.
"What have you said and done to my husband?" asked Flavie, when Colleville had left them.
"Must I tell you all our secrets?"
"Ah! you don't love me," she replied, looking at him with the coquettish slyness of a woman who is not quite decided in her mind.