26
THE BEAUTY OF VICQ DAZYE.
by a pre-Raphaelite landscape of arsenical
green, with the effete trammels of perspective
gallantry disregarded, and trees like Dr. Syn-
tax's wife, "roundabout and rather squat,"
with just two-dozen-and-seven leaves apiece for
liberal allowance. I went to Vicq d'Azyr,
amongst other places, last August, for chamois-
hunting with Dunbar, of the Queen's Bays,
taking up our abode at the Toison d'Or,
whither all artists, tourists, men who come for
the sport, women who come for its scenery, or
invalids who come for its waters (whose prop-
erties, miserable dictu ! are just being discov-
ered as a panacea for every human ill—from a
migraine to an "incurable pulmonary afflic-
tion "), seek accommodation if they can have
it, since it is the only hotel in the place, though
a very good one; is adorned with a balcony
running round the house, twined and buried in
honeysuckle and wild clematis, which enchants
young ladies into constant promotion of it into
their sketch-books; and gives you, what is of
rather more importance, and what makes you
ready to admire the clematis when under gas-
tronomic exasperation, you might swear at it as
a harbor for tarantule—an omelette, I assure
you, well nigh as well cooked as you have it at
Mivart's or Meurice's.
At the Toison d'Or we took up our abode,
and at the Toison d'Or we encountered my two
elder sisters, Constance and Agneta, traveling
for once on the same road, as they had left
Paris together, and were together going on to
the fashionable capital of a fashionable little
toy duchy on the other side of the Rhine, when
they should have finished with the wilder beau-
ties and more unknown charms of Vicq d'Azyr
and its environs. Each lady had her little train
of husband, courier, valet, lady's maid, small
dog and giant jewel-box. I have put the list
in the inverse ratio of their importance, I be-
lieve. Your husband versus your jewel-box?
Of course, my dear madame; absurd! What's
the value of a little simple gold ring against, a
dozen glittering circlets of diamonds, emeralds,
rubies and garnets?
Each lady was bent on recruiting herself at
Vicq d'Azyr after the toils of the season, and
of shining après with all the brilliance that a
fair share of beauty, good positions, and money,
fairly entitled them to expect, at the little Court
of—we will call it Lemongenseidlitz—denom-
inated by its charming Duchess, Princess
Hélène of Lemongenseidlitz-Phizzstrelitz, the
loveliest and most volage of all minor royalties.
Each lady was strongly opposed to whatever
the other wished; each thought the weather
"sultry "when the other thought it "chilly,"
and vice versa. Each considered her own ail-
ments "unheard-of suffering, dear!—I could
never make any one feel!" &c., &c.—and as-
sured you, with mild disdain, that the other's
malady was "purely nervous, entirely exag-
gerated, but she will dwell on it so much, poor
darling!" Each related to you how admirably
they would have traveled if her counsel had
been followed, and described how the other
would take the direction of everything, would
confuse poor Chanderlos, the courier, till he
hardly knew where he was, and would take the
night express out of pure unkindness, just be-
cause she knew how ill it always made lier (the
speaker) feel to be torn across any country the
whole night at that dreadful pace; each was
dissatisfied with everything, pleased with noth-
ing, and bored, as became ladies of good
degree; each found the sun too hot or the wind
too cold, the mists too damp or the air too dry,
and both combined their forces to worry their
ladies'-maids, find fault with the viands, drive
their lords to the registering of an oath never
to travel with women again, welcome us be-
nignly, since they thought we might amuse
them, and smile their sunniest on Dunbar—he's
lieir-prospective to the Gwynne Marquisate, and
Lady Marqueterie, the Saint, is not above keep-
ing one eye open for worldly distinctions,
while Mrs. Albany Protocol, though a Radical,
is, like certain others of the ultra-Liberal party,
not above a personal kow-towing before those
" ridiculous and ought-to-be exploded conserv-
ative institutions "—Rank and Title.
At the Toison d'Or, I say, when, after knock-
ing over izzards ad libitum in another part of
the district, we descended one evening into the
valley where Vicq d'Azyr lies nestled in the
sunset light, with the pretty vendangeuses
trooping down from the sloping vineyards, and
the cattle winding homewards down the hill-
side paths, and the vesper-bells softly chiming
from the convent tower rising yonder above its
'*l»ods  of linden  and acacia—at the Toison
d'Or, just alighting with the respective suites
aforesaid, and all those portable embarrassments
of books, tiger-skin rugs, flacons of bouquet,
traveling-bags warranted to carry any and
everything that the most fastidious can require
en route from Piccadilly to Peru, with which
ladies do love to encumber and embitter their
own persons and their companions' lives, we
met, as I have told you, mesdames mes sœurs.
" What! Dear me, how very singular! Never
should have dreamt of meeting you; so much
too quiet a place, I should have thought. No
Kursaal here? Come for sport—oh! Take Spes,
will you! Poor little dear, he's been barking
the whole way, because he couldn't see out of
the window. Ah, Major Dunbar, charmed to
see you! What an amusing recontre, is it not?"
And. Lady Maréchale, slightly out of temper
for so eminent a Christian at the commence-
ment of her greeting, smoothed down her ruf-
fled feathers and turned smilingly on Dunbar.
I have said he will be one day Marquis of
Gwynne.
"By George, old fellow! you in this out-of-
the-way place ! That's all right. Sport good,
here? Glad to hear it. The deuce take me, if
ever I am lured into traveling in a partie carrée
again."
And Maréchale raised his eyebrows, and
whispered confidentially to me stronger lan-
guage than I may commit to print, though,
considering his provocation, it was surely as
pardonable as Uncle Toby's.
"The thing I dislike in this sort of hotels
and places is the admixture of people with
whom one is obliged to rome in contact," said
Constance, putting up her glass as she entered
the long low room where the humble table
d'hôte of the Toison d'Or was spread. Lady
Maréchale talks sweetly of the equality of per-
sons in the sight of Heaven, but I never heard
her recognize tbe same upon the soil of earth.
"Exactly! One may encounter such very
objectionable characters! /wished to dine in
our own apartments, but Albany said no; and
he is so positive, you know ! This place seems
miserably primitive," responded Agneta. Mrs.
Protocol pets Rouges and Republicans of every
country, talks liberalism like a feminine Siôyes
or John Bright, projects a reform bill that shall
bear the strongest possible family resemblance
to the Décrets du 4 Août, and considers " so-
cial distinctions odious between man and man ;"
but her practice is scarcely consistent with her
theory, seeing that she is about as tenacious
and resentful of objectionable contact as a sea-
anemone.
"Who is that, I wonder?" whispered Lady
Maréchale, acidulating herself in readiness,
after the custom of English ladies when catch-
ing sight of a stranger whom they "don't
know."
"I wonder! All alone—how very queer!"
echoed Mrs. Protocol, drawing her black lace
shawl around her, with that peculiar movement
which announces a woman's prescience of
something antagonistic to her, that is to be re-
pelled d'avance, as surely as a hedgehog's trans-
fer of itself into a prickly ball denotes a sense
of a coming enemy, and a need of caution and
self-protection.
" Who is that deucedly handsome woman?"
whispered Maréchale to me.
"What a charming creature!" echoed Dun-
bar.
The person referred to was tne only woman
at the table d'hôte besides my sisters—a sister-
tourist, probably; a handsome—nay more, a
beautiful woman, about eight-and-twenty, dis-
tinguished-looking, brilliant, with a figure vo-
luptuously perfect as was ever the Princess
Borghese's. To say a woman looks a lady,
means nothing in our day. " That young lady
will wait on you, sir," says the shopman, refer-
ring to the shopwoman who will show you
your gloves. " Hand the 'errings to that lady,
Joe," you hear a fishmonger cry, as you pass
his shop-door; referring by his epithet to some
Mrs. Gamp or Betsy Priggs in search of that
piscatory cheer at his stall. Heaven forbid we
should give the abused and degenerate title to
any woman deserving of the name! Generalize
a thing, and it is vulgar. "A gentleman of
my acquaintance," says Spriggs, an auctioneer
and house-agent, to Smith, a collector of the
water-rate. "Aman I know, "says Pursang,
one of the Cabinet, to Greville Tempest, who
is heir to a Dukedom, and has intermarried with
a royal house. The reason is plain enough.
Spriggs thinks it necessary to inform Smith,
who otherwise might remain ignorant of so
signal a fact, that he actually does know a gen-
tleman, or rather what he terms such. Pur-
sang knows that Tempest would never suspect
him of being lié with men who were anything
else ; the one is proud of the fine English, the
other is content with the simple phrase! Heav-
en forbid, I say, we should, nowadays, call any
woman a lady who is veritably such; let us fall
back on the dignified, definitive, courtly last-
century-name of gentlewoman. I should be
glad to see that name revived; it draws a line
that snobbissimi cannot pass, and has a grand
simplicity about it that will not attract Spriggs,
Smith, and Spark, and Mesdames S., leurs
femmes!
Our sister-tourist, then, at the Toison d'Or,
looked, to my eyes at the least, much more
than a " lady," she looked an aristocratejusq'au
bout des angles, a beautiful, brilliant, dazzling
brunette, with lovely hazel eyes, flashing like a
tartaret falcon's under their arched pencilled
eyebrows, quite an unhoped godsend in Vicq
d'Azyr, where only stragglers resort as yet,
though—alas for my Arcadia—my sisters' pet
physician, who sent them thither, is about, I
believe, to publish a work, entitled "The
Water-Spring in the Wilderness; or, A Scamper
through Spots Unknown," which will do a little
advertising of himself opportunely, and send
hundreds next season to invade the wild wood-
lands and sunny valleys he inhumanly drags
forth into the gas-glare of the world.
The brilliant hazel eyes were opposite to me
at dinner, and were, I confess, more attractive
to me than the stewed pigeons, the crisp frog-
legs, and the other viands prepared by the (con-
sidering we were in the heart of one of the most
remote provinces) really not bad cook of the
Toison d'Or. Lady Maréchale and Mrs. Pro-
tocol honored her with that stare by which one
woman knows so well how to destroy the repu-
tation of another without speech; they had
taken her measurement by some method of
feminine geometry unknown to us, and the re-
sult was apparently not favorable,to her, for
over the countenances of the two ladies
gathered that expression of stiff dignity and
virtuous disdain, in the assuming of which, as
I have observed before, they are inimitable
proficients. "Evidently not a proper person!"
was written on every one of their lineaments.
Constance and Agneta had made up their
minds with celerity and decision as to her social
status, with, it is to be presumed, that unerring
instinct which leads their sex to a conclusion so
instantaneously, that, according to a philoso-
pher, a woman will be at the top of the stair-
case of Reasoning by a single spring, while a
man is toiling slowly up the first few steps.
"You are intending to remain here some
days, madame?" asked the fair stranger, with
a charming smile, of Lady Maréchale—a pleasant
little overture to chance ephemeral acquaint-
ance, such as a table d'hôte surely well war-
rants.
But the pleasant little overture was one to
which Lady Maréchale was far too English to
respond. With that inimitable breeding for
which our countrymen and women are con-
tinentally renowned, she bent her head with
stately stiffness, indulged herself with a haughty
stare at the offender, and turned to Agneta, to
murmur in English her disgust with the cuisine
of the really unoffending Toison d'Or.
"Poor Spes would eat nothing. Fenton
must make him some panada. But perhaps
there was nothing better than goat's milk in the
house ! What could Dr. Berkely be thinking
of? He described the place quite as though it
were a second Meurice's or Badischer Hof !"
A look of amusement glanced into the spark-
ling, yet languid eyes of my opposite neighbor.
"English!" she murmured to herself, with
an almost imperceptible but sufficiently scorn-
ful elevation of her arched eyebrows, and a
slight smile, just showing her white teeth, as I
addressed her in French; and she answered me
with the ease, the aplomb, the ever suave
courtesy of a woman of the world, with that
polish which gives the most common subjects a
brilliance never their own; and that vivacity
which confers on the merest trifles a spell to
amuse and to charm. She was certainly a very
lovely creature, and a very charming one, too ;
frank, animated, witty, with the tone of a
woman who has seen the world and knows it.
Dunbar adored her, at first sight; he is an in-
flammable fellow, and has been ignited a thous-
and times at far less provocation. Maréchale
prepared for himself fifty conjugal orations by
the recklessness with which, Under the very eyes
of madame, he devoted himself to another
woman. Even Albany Protocol, dull, somnolent,