AT six o’clock on the morning of Ash Wednesday in the year 1847, the Honorable Charles Cunningham sat sipping his coffee in the restaurant of the Vendanges de Bourgogne. He was somewhat fatigued by the exertions that as “lion” of the moment he had felt bound to make, exertions that had included a display of English eccentricity and had culminated in a cotillion at a noble house in the Faubourg St.-Germain, the daughter of which had been assigned to him by Parisian gossip as his future wife. Marriage, however, did not present itself to his contemplation as an urgent duty; and he sipped his coffee, reassured by the example of his brother Saxby, who, with the responsibility of a family succession, remained a bachelor. In any case, the notion of marrying a French girl was preposterous; he was not to be flattered into an unsuitable alliance by compliments upon his French. Certainly he spoke French uncommonly well, devilishly well for an Englishman, he told himself; and he stroked his whiskers in complacent meditation.

Charles Cunningham had arrived at the Vendanges de Bourgogne to watch that rowdy climax of Carnival, the descente de la Courtille. And now through the raw air they were coming down from Belleville, all sorts of revelers in masks and motley and rags. The noise of tin trumpets and toy drums, of catcalls and cocoricots, of laughter and cheers and whistling, came nearer. Presently the road outside was thronged for the aristocrats of the Faubourg St.-Germain to alight from their carriages and mix with the mob. This was the traditional climax of Carnival for Parisian society: every year they drove here on Ash Wednesday morning to get themselves banged on the head by bladders, to be spurted with cheap scent and pelted with sugar-plums, and to retaliate by flinging down hot louis for the painful enrichment of the masses. The noise was for a time deafening; but gradually the cold light of morning and the melancholy Lenten bells cast a gloom upon the crowd, which passed on toward the boulevards, diminishing in sound and size at every street corner.

The tall, fair Englishman let himself be carried along by the exodus, thinking idly what excitable folk foreigners were, but conscious, nevertheless, of a warmth of intimacy that was not at all disagreeable, the kind of intimacy that is bestowed on a man by taking a pack of friendly dogs for a country walk. Suddenly he was aware of a small hand upon his sleeve, a small hand that lay there like a white butterfly; and, looking down, he saw a poke-bonnet garlanded with yellow rosebuds. The poke-bonnet was all he could see, for the wearer kept her gaze steadily on the road, while with little feet she mimicked his long strides. The ineffable lightness of the arm laid on his own, the joyous mockery of her footsteps, the sense of an exquisite smile beneath the poke-bonnet, and the airy tremor of invitation that fluttered from the golden shawl of Siamese crÊpe about her shoulders tempted him to withdraw from the crowd at the first opportunity. Soon they were in a by-street, whence the clamor of Carnival slowly died away, leaving no sound upon the morning air but their footfalls and the faint whisper of her petticoats where she tripped along beside him.

Presently the poke-bonnet was raised; Charles Cunningham beheld his companion’s face, a perfect oval, set with eyes of deepest brown, demurely passionate, eyes that in this empty street were all for him. He had never considered himself a romantic young man; when this encounter had faded to a mere flush upon the dreamy sky of the past, he was always a little scornful of his first remark, and apt to wonder how the deuce he ever came to make it.

“By Jove! vous savez, vous Êtes tout À fait comme un oiseau!”

“Eh, alors?” she murmured, in a tone that was neither defiance nor archness nor indifference nor invitation, but something that was compounded of all four and expressed exactly herself. “Eh, alors?”

“Votre nid est loin d’ici?” he asked.

Nor did he blush for the guise of his speech at the time: afterward it struck him as most indecorously poetic.

“Viens donc,” she whispered.

“Comment appelez-vous?”

“Moi, je suis AdÈle.”

“AdÈle quoi?” he pressed.

“Mais AdÈle alors, tout simplement Ça.”

“C’est un peu—vous savez—un peu.” He made a sweep with his unoccupied arm to indicate the vagueness of it all.

“I love you,” she trilled; deep down in her ivory throat emotion caught the trill and made of it a melody that set his heart beating.

“Vraiment?” he asked, very solemnly; then laying syllable upon syllable in a kind of amazed deliberation, as a child builds a tower of bricks, he began to talk to her in French.

“Mais, comme tu parles bien,” she told him.

“Tu m’inspires,” he murmured, hoarsely.

Afterward, when he looked back at the adventure, he awarded this remark the prize for folly.

The adventure did not have a long life; a week later Charles Cunningham was called back to England by the news of his brother’s illness. Before Lent was out he had become the Earl of Saxby, who really had to think seriously of marriage and treat it with more respect than the Parisian gossip over which Charles Cunningham had idly mused at six o’clock of Ash Wednesday morning in the year 1847. As for AdÈle, she met in May the owner of a traveling-booth, a widower called Bassompierre with a small son, who had enough of the gipsy to attract the irresponsible AdÈle and enough of the bourgeois to induce her to marry him for the sake of a secure and solid future. She need not have troubled about her future, the deep-voiced AdÈle; for just when November darkens to December she died in giving birth to Juliette. The gipsy in Albert Bassompierre accepted as his own daughter Juliette; the bourgeois in him erected a cross in the cemetery and put a wreath of immortelles in a glass case to lie on AdÈle’s tomb. Then he locked away the few pieces of jewelry that life had brought her, hung another daguerreotype beside the one of his first wife, and wrapped Juliette in a golden shawl of Siamese crÊpe. Lightly the two daguerreotypes swung to and fro; and lightly rocked the cradle where the baby Juliette lay sleeping, while the caravan jolted southward along the straight French roads where the poplars seemed to be commenting to one another in the wind.

For eighteen years the caravan jolted along these roads, until young Edouard Bassompierre was old enough to play leading man throughout the repertory and thereby most abruptly plunge his predecessor into old age. At the same time Juliette was allowed to act the soubrettes; her father was too much afraid of the leading lady to play any tricks of suddenly imposed senility with her. It was, on the whole, a jolly life, this vagrancy from fair to fair of all the towns of France. It was jolly, when the performance was done, to gather in the tent behind the stage and eat chipped potatoes and drink red wine with all the queer people whose voices were hoarse with crying their wares all the day long.

Then came, one springtime, the fair at CompiÈgne. Business was splendid, for the Emperor was there to hunt the wild boar in the forest. Never had old Albert Bassompierre beaten his big drum so confidently at the entrance of his booth; never had Edouard captured so many young women’s hearts; both of them were too much occupied with their own triumphs to notice the young officer who came every night to the play. The Emperor left CompiÈgne in April; when he departed, the young officer departed also, accompanied by Juliette.

“Ah, la vache,” cried old Bassompierre; “it’s perhaps as well her mother didn’t live, for she might have done the same.”

“You should have let her play the lead,” said Edouard.

“She can play lead in real life,” replied old Bassompierre. “If she can,” he added, fiercely.

But when Juliette wrote to him from Paris and told him how happy she was with her lover, the gipsy in Bassompierre drove out the bourgeois, and he sent his daughter her mother’s jewelry and the golden shawl; but he kept the daguerreotype, for, after all, Juliette was not really his daughter and AdÈle had really been his wife.

Three years passed. Juliette lived in a little house at Belleville with two baby girls called ElÈne and Henriette. When in after years she looked back to this time it seemed to her smothered in roses, the roses of an operatic scene. Everything, indeed, in retrospect was like that—the arrival of her lover in his gay uniform, the embowered kisses, the lights of Paris far below, the suppers on the veranda, the warm Sunday mornings, the two babies asleep on the lawn and their father watching them, herself before a glass and her lover’s face seen over her shoulder, the sudden sharp embrace; all were heavy with the intolerable sense of a curtain that must fall. Then came the war; there was a hurried move down to stuffy apartments in Paris; ready money hastily got together by the young officer, who spoke confidently of the large sum it was, since, after all, the war would be over in a month and the Prussians have had their lesson; and at last a breathless kiss. The crowds surged cheering through the streets, the two babies screamed disapproval of their new surroundings, and

Juliette’s lover was killed in the first battle; he had only time to scribble a few trembling lines:

Yet when she received this letter, some impulse kept her from going to her lover’s father. She could not bear the possibility of being made to realize that those debonair years of love were regarded by him as an intrigue to be solved by money. If AndrÉ’s mother had been alive, she might have felt differently; now she would not trouble a stricken family that might regard her tears as false; she would not even try to return to her own father. No doubt he would welcome her; but pride, all the strange and terrible pride that was henceforth to haunt Juliette’s soul, forbade her.

It was impossible, however, to remain in Paris; and without any reason for her choice she took her babies to Lyon and settled down in rooms overlooking the RhÔne, to await the end of the war. When she had paid the cost of the journey and bought herself the necessary mourning, she found she had nearly eleven thousand francs left; with care this could surely be made to last three years at least; in three years much might happen. As a matter of fact, much happened almost at once; for the beauty of Juliette, a lustrous and imperial beauty, caught the fancy of Gustave Lataille, who was conductor of the orchestra at one of the smaller theaters in Lyon. To snare his fancy might not have been enough; but when with her dowry she captured also his imagination, he married her. Juliette did not consider it wrong to marry this somber, withered, and uncommunicative man of forty, for whom she had neither passion nor affection. He struck her as essentially like most of the husbands she had observed hitherto; and she esteemed herself lucky not to have met such a one before she had been granted the boon of love. She must have inherited from that unknown father her domestic qualities; she certainly acquired none from AdÈle. From him, too, may have come that pride which, however it may have found its chief expression in ideals of bourgeois respectability, was nevertheless a fine fiery virtue and supported her spirit to the very last.

Juliette and Lataille lived together without anything to color a drab existence. Notwithstanding his connection with the theater, Lataille had no bohemian tastes; once when his wife suggested, after a visit from her father, that there seemed no reason why she should not apply for an engagement to act, he unhesitatingly refused his permission; when she attempted to argue, he reminded her that he had given his name to ElÈne and Henriette, and she was silent. Henceforth she devoted herself to sewing, and brought into the world four girls in successive years—FranÇoise, Marie, Marguerite, and Valentine. The last was born in 1875, soon after the Latailles had moved to Lille, where Gustave had secured the post of conductor at the principal theater. Juliette welcomed the change, for it gave her the small house of her own which she had long wanted; moreover, nobody in Lille knew at first hand of the circumstances in which Gustave had married her, so that ElÈne and Henrietta could go to school without being teased about their mother’s early lapse from the standards of conduct which she fervently desired they would adopt.

Unfortunately, the conductor had only enjoyed his advancement a year when he was struck down by a paralytic stroke. With six small children and a palsied husband upon her hands, Juliette had to find work. Partly from compassion for her ill-fortune, but chiefly because by now she was a most capable seamstress, the management of the theater engaged her as wardrobe mistress; and for five years Juliette sustained her husband, her children, and her house. They were years that would have rubbed the bloom from most women; but Juliette’s beauty seemed to grow rather than diminish. Her personality became proverbial in the town of Lille, and though as wardroom mistress she was denied the public triumph of the footlights, she had nevertheless a fame of her own that was considered unique in the history of her profession. Her pride flourished on the deference that was shown her even by the management; between her beauty and her sharp tongue she achieved an authority that reached its height in the way she brought up her children. Their snowy pinafores, their trim stockings, their manners, and their looks were the admiration of the quartier; and when in the year 1881 Gustave Lataille died, the neatness of their new black dresses surprised even the most confirmed admirers of Madame Lataille’s industry and taste. At no time could Juliette have seemed so beautiful as when, after the funeral, she raised her widow’s veil and showed the attendant sympathizers a countenance unmarked by one tear of respectable emotion. She was far too proud to weep for a husband whom she had never loved and whose death was a relief; when the neighbors expressed astonishment at the absence of any outward sorrow, she flung out a challenge to fate:

“I have not reached the age of thirty-four, and brought up six children, and never once been late with so much as a ribbon, to cry for any man now. He’ll be a wonderful man that will ever make me cry. Henriette, don’t tug at your garter.”

And as she stood there, with great brown eyes burning beneath a weight of lustrous black hair, she seemed of marble without and within.

Nevertheless, before six months had passed, Madame Lataille fell impetuously in love with a young English clerk of twenty-one, called Henry Snow; what is more, she married him. Nobody in Lille was able to offer a credible explanation of her behavior. People were willing to admit that his conduct was comprehensible, notwithstanding the fourteen years of her seniority; and it says much for the way Juliette had impressed her personality upon a dull provincial world that Henry Snow’s action should have been so immediately understood. Before the problem of her conduct, however, the world remained in perplexity. Financial considerations could not have supplied a motive; from all accounts the Englishman was unlikely to help; indeed, gossip said that even in his obscure position he had already had opportunities of showing that, such as it was, the position was better than he deserved and unlikely to be bettered in the future. Nor could his good looks have attracted her, for he was insignificant; and since Englishmen in the experience of Lille were, whatever their faults, never insignificant, the insignificance of Henry Snow acquired an active quality which contradicted its characterization and made him seem not merely unattractive, but positively displeasing. Nor could she have required some one to help in managing her six children; altogether the affair was a mystery, which gathered volume when the world began to realize the depth of the feeling that Henry Snow had roused in Juliette. All the world loves a lover, but only when it is allowed to obtrude itself upon the love. Juliette, absorbed by her emotion and the eternal jealousy of the woman who marries a man much younger than herself, refused to admit any spectators to marvel at the development of the mystery. She carried on her work as usual; but instead of maintaining her position as a figure she became an object of curiosity, and presently, because that curiosity was never gratified, an object of suspicion. The lover-loving world began to shake its head and calumny whispered everywhere its commentary; she could never have been a femme propre; this marriage must have been forced upon the young Englishman as the price of a five-year-old intrigue. When some defender of Juliette pointed out that the clerk had only been in Lille three years, that his name had never been connected with hers, and that in any case he was only twenty-one now, calumny retorted with a long line of Henry Snows; presently the story of Juliette’s life with AndrÉ Duchesnil was dragged to light, and by an infinite multiplication of whispers her career from earliest youth was established as licentious, mercenary, and cruel.

For a while Juliette was so much wrapped up in her own joy that she did not observe the steady withdrawal of popular esteem. Having made it clear to everybody that she wished to be left alone with her husband, she supposed she had been successful and congratulated herself accordingly, until one day a persistent friend, proof against Juliette’s icy discouragement, drove into her that the quartier was pitying Henry Snow, that things were being said against her, and that the only way to put a stop to unkind gossip was to move about among the neighbors in more friendly fashion.

Gradually it dawned upon Juliette that her friend was the emissary of a universally accepted calumny, the voice of the quartier, the first to brave her, and only now rash enough to do so because she had public opinion at her back. This did not prevent Juliette from showing her counselor the door to the street, nor from slamming it so abruptly that a meter of stuff was torn from her skirt; yet when she went back to her room and picked up her needlework there came upon her with a shock the realization of what effect all this might have on Henry. If the world were pitying him now, it would presently be laughing; if he were laughed at, he would grow to hate her. Hitherto she had been so happy in her love that she had never stopped to consider anything or anybody. She remembered now Henry’s amazement when, in the first tumultuous wave of passion dammed for so many years, she had refused to let herself be swept away; she recalled his faint hesitation when first she spoke of marriage and gave him to understand that without marriage she would not be his. Even then he must have foreseen the possibility of ridicule, and he had only married her because she had been able to seem so desirable. And she was still desirable; he was still enthralled; he was still vain of her love; yet how was the flattery of one woman to mitigate for a man the contempt of the crowd? Mercifully, he was an Englishman in a French town, therefore it would take longer for the popular feeling to touch him; but soon or late it would strike home to his vanity. Something must be devised to transfix him with the dignity of marriage. They must have a child; no father could do anything but resent and despise laughter that would be directed against his fatherhood. Juliette’s wish was granted very shortly afterward; and when she told her husband of their expectation she held him close and looked deep into his eyes for the triumph she sought. Perhaps the fire in her own was reflected in his, for she released him from her embrace with a sigh of content.

Through the months of waiting Juliette longed for a boy. It seemed to her somehow essential for the retention of Henry’s love that she should give him a boy; she could scarcely bear another girl, she who had brought into the world six girls. Much of Juliette’s pride during those months was softened by her longing; she began once more to frequent the company of her neighbors in her zest for the least scrap of information that would help the fulfilment of it. There was no fantastic concoction she would not drink, nor any omen she would not propitiate. Half the saints in the calendar were introduced to her by ladies that knew them and vouched for the interest they would take in her pregnancy. Juliette never confided to anybody her reason for wanting a boy; and nobody suspected it, since half a dozen girls were enough to explain any woman’s desire for a change. One adviser discovered in a tattered volume of obstetrical theory that when the woman was older than the man the odds were on a male child. Juliette’s researches to gather confirmation of this remark led her into discussions about unequal marriages; and as the time of her confinement drew near she became gentler and almost anxious to discuss her love for Henry Snow, so much gentler and less reserved that those who had formerly whispered loudest and most falsely to one another now whispered sympathetically to her.

On the day before Juliette’s confinement her husband came in from work very irritable.

“Here, when’s this baby going to be born? I’m getting a bit annoyed. The men at the office are betting on its being a boy. It makes me look a fool, you know, that sort of thing.”

She clutched his arm. “Which do you want, Henri? Tell me, mon amour, mon homme.”

“I don’t care which it is, as long as you’re quick about it and this betting stops.”

That night she was delivered of a girl, and because it was his she choked down the wild disappointment and loved Sylvia the best of all her seven girls.