“My grandmother thought to marry her to the son of Marshal de Bellisle, the Count de Gisors. This young man was in his day what you are going to be we hope, the best looking, the finest, and the most lovable of them all. But Septimanie’s father did not think a great deal of the family. ‘Really,’ he said to my grandmother with malice, and this is to show you what sort of a man he was, ‘the two young people can always meet after Septimanie has a husband.’ And so it was that, against her will, Septimanie became Madame d’Egmont.
“Her husband Casimir-August d’Egmont Pignatelli was the most reverential, silent, and most boring of men.
“Thus it came about that Mademoiselle de Richelieu, my very dear friend, became Countess d’Egmont, with all that this means, and that is, as we have the simplicity and good taste to say nowadays, that she had married into a family which was one of the best connected in Europe. In other words she was a Princess de Cleves and of the Empire, Duchess de Gueldres, de Julliers, d’Agrigente, as well as a Grandee of Spain by the creation of Charles V, and therefore on the same footing as the Duchesses of Alba and Medina-Coeli, who are of course the first ladies in Europe. I could run on for four pages more with the titles belonging to the great and mighty house of d’Egmont, which is descended in a direct line from the Reigning Dukes de Gueldres, and which the great aristocracy in all countries has had the mortification to see die out for want of an heir. And afterwards it was always said that this was Mademoiselle de Richelieu’s fault.
“However Madame d’Egmont got on quite well with her husband. No more than that. And, in the meantime, a marriage was arranged between a Mademoiselle de Nivernais and Monsieur de Gisors. But the young man was killed a few months after the ceremony.
“So the two lovers never had the chance to meet after Septimanie had a husband.
“But Madame d’Egmont could so little forget him that she fainted if his name came up in conversation. This actually happened when the Prince Abbot de Salm purposely named him, and the young woman was taken with appalling convulsions on the spot; after which all decent people shut their doors to that wicked old hunch back.
“Now there was at this time an old man, a member of the well-known family de Lusignan who, if no one knew him by sight, was at least familiar to everyone by name. He was called the Vidame de Poitiers. It was generally understood that he vegetated away in a great house, but he was never seen because he was so extremely eccentric. So you can imagine the Countess d’Egmont’s surprise when one day she had a letter from the Vidame asking her to be so good as to pay him a visit, in order that he might put before her a matter of some importance. He said he could not wait upon her in her own home as he would have wished because, as he put it, he was not ‘transportable’; a phrase which, as things turned out, and if you have the patience to read your old grandmother to the end, was, as you will come to realize, ever afterwards of significance at the Richelieu’s.
“Madame d’Egmont did not want to go, but rather unexpectedly her father the Marshal insisted, and she had to give in.
“So one afternoon she started off, in her carriage with six horses, only to find the outriders did not know the way because no one went there any more. But she arrived at last and when she was shown in at the door she found, without giving the least idea of it from the outside, that the Vidame’s house was nothing more or less than a kind of dream palace. Used as Madame d’Egmont was to the elegance of her father’s residence, and to the magnificence of her great uncle, the Cardinal’s, mansion which is unequalled, she was amazed at what she now saw. The entrance hall and marble staircase were stately with statues and evergreen shrubs, the antechambers were full of liveried footmen drawn up in two ranks, all the saloons were of an unparalleled grandeur and led to a long, high gallery in the form of a winter garden along which, under a vault of orange, myrtle, and flowering rose trees she was escorted towards nothing less than a sort of rustic retreat raised above floor level. Even the steps up were formed out of the trunks of forest trees, with a handrail of gnarled branches. She was left to climb this alone, and she found herself in a sort of elegant cowshed, in which was an old gentleman fast asleep on a little bed, with his head carefully wrapped up. Madame d’Egmont felt dreadfully embarrassed. Then, while she waited for the Vidame to come out of his sleep, she looked about. The walls were whitewashed, and there actually were five or six cows feeding peacefully in their stalls. A few pieces of simple furniture were between his bed and one wall. She particularly noticed that everything was spotlessly clean. All this affectation of a peasant simplicity in the centre of Paris, and in a palace, began to amuse Madame d’Egmont. She sat down on a little cane-bottomed chair to wait. After a quarter of an hour she coughed, then she coughed louder, until at last she threw modesty to the winds and coughed as loud as she could, enough to make her spit blood. In the end when she saw it was no use, and that the old gentleman would not wake up, she thought it would be comic to go away without saying anything to the Vidame’s page who was waiting for her below.
“We were all waiting for Madame d’Egmont at the Richelieu’s when she got back. While she was telling us, and we were in shouts of laughter, her father the Marshal unexpectedly came in. All at once he began working his little mouth and shutting his eyes, a sure sign that he was displeased. ‘Countess d’Egmont,’ he brought out in his nastiest voice, which is saying a great deal, ‘in my opinion you should not have behaved as you did before a man of his age, as well born as he, ill as he is as well. I advise you to go back no later than tomorrow morning.’
“‘Alas Monsieur,’ she replied, making her voice, that was always so soft, even softer, and turning on him her eyes which literally enchanted you, and which, on this occasion, were half appealing and half malicious, ‘but how am I to set about waking the gentleman?’
“In the end Madame d’Egmont had to agree, after which the Marshal tried to change the conversation without, however, being able to hide his anger. As soon as he left the room, which he did at the first opportunity, Madame d’Egmont complained that she thought he was being most frightfully difficult. She said it would prove to be almost impossible to avoid laughing in the Vidame’s face, and that in any case she would find herself with the old man in the undignified position of a little girl who has played a trick. But then she went on to put her real reason, which was that she had been overcome by a presentiment of evil, that evil must result from a second visit to the Vidame.
“The second time she visited him she found the old gentleman sitting up in bed. But he seemed very poorly, so much so that with a real feeling of horror she realized he could not have long to live. However he did not appear at all embarrassed by what he had to tell, and set about it at once, and quite methodically.
“After thanking her in the most respectful way for calling on him, without referring to the previous visit which he had slept through, Monsieur de Poitiers handed Madame d’Egmont a bundle of old letters from the late Count de Gisors addressed to himself, and begged her to read them. She found, poor thing it nearly suffocated her, that they were all almost entirely about herself. The Count de Gisors wrote of her so passionately, as she told me afterwards, that she felt as though her heart were in a vice. But there was also mention of an unhappy child his father, the Marshal de Bellisle, had abandoned, and for whom the young man desired the Vidame to do what he could. ‘I shall not come back, I am sure of it, I shall not come back from this war,’ he had written in the last letter, ‘and I call on you to look after Severin, that I may die easy at least on that.’