At last, however, it was finished, and she stood in the presence of Louis XV. He was no longer young, but she thought him handsome and imposing. He had intensely blue eyes, a short but not brusque manner of speaking, and something royal and majestic about his whole bearing which distinguished him from other men. He talked a great deal to Mme. de Puisieux, and made complimentary remarks about Félicité, after which they were presented to the Queen, who was lying in a reclining chair, already suffering from the languor of the fatal illness caused by the recent death of her son, the Dauphin. Then came the presentation to Mesdames, and to the “Children of France,” and in the evening they went to the “_jeu de Mesdames_.”
After this Félicité and her husband returned to Genlis, where they spent the summer with the Marquis and the wife he had recently married.
They passed their time in all the amusements of the _vie de château_ in those days.
The brothers went out shooting; there were visits, dances, village _fêtes_; they dressed up, wrote verses, acted plays, and went to see the “Rosière,” an institution which, in this century, would be an impossibility, and which even then many people were beginning to find silly and useless, as may be shown by the remarks of a M. de Matigny, a magistrate and _bailli_, who was staying in the house for some theatricals, and whom they tried to persuade to stop another day.
“I can’t,” he said. “I am obliged to go to another village.”
“Oh! for that nonsense they do every year.”
“I have to go there as a judge to hear all the rubbish and gossip you can imagine for forty-eight hours.”
“A most stupid thing, as I will tell you. It is not to adjudge a house, or a field, or an inheritance, but a rose!”
“Eh! _Mon Dieu!_ Yes, it is I who have to decide this important affair. It is an old custom established there in barbarous times. It is astonishing that, in a century so enlightened as ours, they should not have done away with a folly that gives me a journey of ten or twelve leagues every summer, through abominable cross-lanes, for I have to make two journeys for that absurdity.”
“A rose does not seem to me particularly barbarous. But who do you give it to?”