Villette (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charlotte Bronte [119]
Well, I was sitting wondering at it (as the bench was there, I thought I might as well take advantage of its accommodation), and thinking that while some of the details—as roses, gold cups, jewels, &:c.—were very prettily painted, it was on the whole an enormous piece of claptrap; the room, almost vacant when I entered, began to fill. Scarcely noticing this circumstance (as, indeed, it did not matter to me) I retained my seat; rather to rest myself than with a view to studying this huge, dark-complexioned gipsy-queen; of whom, indeed, I soon tired, and betook myself for refreshment to the contemplation of some exquisite little pictures of still life: wild-flowers, wild-fruit, mossy wood-nests, casketing eggs that looked like pearls seen through clear green sea-water; all hung modestly beneath that coarse and preposterous canvass.
Suddenly a light tap visited my shoulder. Starting, turning, I met a face bent to encounter mine; a frowning, almost a shocked face it was.
‘Que faites vous ici?’ said a voice.
‘Mais, monsieur, je m’amuse.’
‘Vous vous amusez! et à quoi, s’il vous plait? Mais d‘abord, faites-moi le plaisir de vous lever: prenez mon bras, et allons de l’autre cote.’du
I did precisely as I was bid. M. Paul Emanuel (it was he) returned from Rome, and now a travelled man, was not likely to be less tolerant of insubordination now, than before this added distinction laurelled his temples.
‘Permit me to conduct you to your party,’ said he, as we crossed the room.
‘I have no party.’
‘You are not alone?’
‘Yes, monsieur.’
‘Did you come here unaccompanied?’
‘No, monsieur. Dr. Bretton brought me here.’
‘Dr. Bretton and Madame his mother, of course?’
‘No; only Dr. Bretton.’
‘And he told you to look at that picture?’
‘By no means: I found it out for myself.’
M. Paul’s hair was shorn close as raven down, or I think it would have bristled on his head. Beginning now to perceive his drift, I had a certain pleasure in keeping cool, and working him up.
‘Astounding insular audacity!’ cried the Professor. ‘Singulieres femmes que ces Anglaises!’
‘What is the matter, monsieur?’
‘Matter! How dare you, a young person, sit coolly down, with the self-possession of a garçon, and look at that picture?’
‘It is a very ugly picture, but I cannot at all see why I should not look at it.’
‘Bon! bon! Speak no more of it. But you ought not to be here alone.’
‘If, however, I have no society—no party, as you say? And then, what does it signify whether I am alone, or unaccompanied? nobody meddles with me.’
‘Taisez-vous, et asseyez-vous la—la!’ Setting down a chair with emphasis in a particularly dull corner, before a series of most specially dreary ‘cadres.’
‘Mais, monsieur.’
‘Mais, mademoiselle, asseyez vous, et ne bougez pas—en-tendez-vous? jusqu’ à ce qu’on vienne vous chercher, ou que je vous donne la permission.’
‘Quel triste coin!’ cried I, ‘et quels laids tableaux!’dv
And ‘laids,’ indeed, they were; being a set of four, denominated in the catalogue ‘La vie d’une femme.‘dw They were painted rather in a remarkable style—flat, dead, pale and formal. The first represented a ‘Jeune Fille,’ coming out of a church-door, a missal in her hand, her dress very prim, her eyes cast down, her mouth pursed up—the image of a most villanous little precocious she-hypocrite. The second, a ‘Mariée’ with a long white veil, kneeling at a prie-dieu in her chamber, holding her hands plastered together, finger to finger, and showing the whites of her eyes in a most exasperating manner. The third, a ‘Jeune Mere,’ hanging disconsolate over a clayey and puffy baby with a face like an unwholesome full moon. The fourth, a ‘Veuve,’ being a black woman, holding by the hand a black little girl, and the twain studiously surveying an elegant French monument, set up in