Certainly he would make a fine
attorney-general, endowed with elastic, mischievous, and even murderous
eloquence, or an orator of the shrewd type of Benjamin Constant. The
bitterness and the hatred which formerly actuated him had now turned
into soft-spoken perfidy; the poison was transformed into anodyne.
"Good-evening, my dear; how are you?" said Madame de Chargeboeuf,
greeting Sylvie.
Bathilde went straight to the fireplace, took off her bonnet, looked
at herself in the glass, and placed her pretty foot on the fender that
Rogron might admire it.
"What is the matter with you?" she said to him, looking directly in
his face. "You have not bowed to me. Pray why should we put on our
best velvet gowns to please you?"
She pushed past Pierrette to lay down her hat, which the latter took
from her hand, and which she let her take exactly as though she were a
servant. Men are supposed to be ferocious, and tigers too; but neither
tigers, vipers, diplomatists, lawyers, executioners or kings ever
approach, in their greatest atrocities, the gentle cruelty, the
poisoned sweetness, the savage disdain of one young woman for another,
when she thinks herself superior in birth, or fortune, or grace, and
some question of marriage, or precedence, or any of the feminine
rivalries, is raised. The "Thank you, mademoiselle," which Bathilde
said to Pierrette was a poem in many strophes. She was named Bathilde,
and the other Pierrette.
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