III.

The next morning, at his frugal breakfast in a rather lofty apartment of the Hôtel Carnavalet, the Prince de Courtenaye read with much amazement the following letter:

“MY DEAR COUSIN: I am an old woman and your near relation. I have long observed with pain the poverty which keeps you from assuming your proper station. I have wealth, and not many years to keep it. What is a burden to me will be a help to you. Suffer me, then, from my superfluity to relieve your necessity—I claim it as the twofold privilege of age and love—and accept as frankly as I tender it the 25,000 francs which I enclose to procure you an establishment suited to your rank. On the first of every month 4,000 francs will be forwarded to you in addition.”

Some commonplaces of civility ended this remarkable but not unpleasant epistle—would that such a one some celestial postman might leave at the door of the present writer, to whom documents of a far different nature—but this is a painful and unnecessary digression. Let us continue. The prince read the queer communication with conflicting emotions, in which wonder predominated. He was not aware of any wealthy aunt or female relative particularly prone to this sort of furtive benevolence; but his connections were legion, and women were odd fish. Still, his honor seemed to him to forbid his accepting a fortune so acquired. But older and wiser heads stifled, or at least silenced, his scruples; and secretly resolving to leave no stone unturned to discover his mysterious benefactress, and to return to her or to her heirs every sou of the money, which in his heart he accepted only as a loan, he resigned himself to his good-luck with tolerable cheerfulness. Henceforth no more elegant equipage was to be seen than the Prince de Courtenaye’s. He became the fashion; he was the life and talk of every _salon_—as we should say, the success of the season. Nevertheless, he failed not to go every afternoon to the garden of the Palais Royal for his nosegay, with this difference only: that he now paid francs instead of sous.

A year sped away, spent by the prince in buying nosegays and in sharing the gayeties, though not the dissipations, of the court; by Nanette in continuing to perfect herself secretly in all the feminine accomplishments of her time, so that now, at the age of nineteen, she was not only peerless in beauty, but as cultivated as Mme. de Sévigné and as learned as Mme. Dacier—no, not as Mme. Dacier—no mere mortal was ever so learned as Mme. Dacier; but let us say as Mme. de La Fayette, who could set Father Rapin right in his Latin and silence Ménage. Was it for herself she underwent these prodigious labors? It is not known that she ever mentioned. But she still sold nosegays and still reaped a golden harvest.

One evening the Count de la Châtre was again sitting beside her when the Marquis de Louvois once more accosted him.

“My dear fellow,” said he, “what the mischief ails Pierre?” (he spoke of De Courtenaye). “He must be going mad. Have you heard his latest freak? Mlle. de Craon, one of our wealthiest heiresses, with a royal dowry and a princely income, is proposed to him, and what do you think? He refuses her—positively refuses. What bee is in his bonnet?”

“Love.”

“Love! Is it one of the Royal Princesses, then?”

“I imagine not.”

“Who then? Some divinity of the _coulisses_, I’ll wager.”

“Louvois,” said the count gravely, “you wrong our friend. De Courtenaye, as you know, abhors vice, and I am much mistaken if she whom he loves is not a virtuous woman.”

Louvois shrugged his shoulders as only a certain kind of Frenchman can. Virtue was a word not in his dictionary.

The next day the prince received this note, the second from his unknown relative:

“MY NEPHEW: Why do you decline to marry Mlle. de Craon, who unites all that is illustrious in birth and splendid in fortune? I will provide you with the capital of the income I now allow you. Accept also as a wedding-gift for your intended the jewels I send herewith.

“If you consent, wear for eight days in your buttonhole a carnation; if you refuse, a rose.”

With the letter came a handsome jewel-case containing a million of francs in bills—it is well for the romancer to be liberal in these matters—and a magnificent parure of diamonds of the purest water, valued by the Tiffany of the time at 100,000 more.

That afternoon it was noticed in the garden that Nanette was unusually pale and silent. The Prince de Courtenaye entered at his usual hour; the nosegay in his buttonhole bore neither pink nor rose. He drew near the flower-girl, who offered him a posy with a hand she vainly tried to make steady. Like his own, it had neither pink nor rose.

The prince examined Nanette’s offering attentively, smiled sadly, stood for an instant in a musing attitude twirling the bouquet in his fingers, and then suddenly, as one whose mind is made up:

“My child,” he said, “will you make me the present of a rose?”

Nanette fainted.