He remained beside the countess and, while talking with her, continued his meditations.  She did not look her age; one would have set her down as being twenty-eight at most, for her eyes, above all, which were filled with the dark blue shadow of her long eyelashes, retained the glowing light of youth.  Bred in a divided family, so that she used to spend one month with the Marquis de Chouard, another with the marquise, she had been married very young, urged on, doubtless, by her father, whom she embarrassed after her mother’s death.  A terrible man was the marquis, a man about whom strange tales were beginning to be told, and that despite his lofty piety!  Fauchery asked if he should have the honor of meeting him.  Certainly her father was coming, but only very late; he had so much work on hand!  The journalist thought he knew where the old gentleman passed his evenings and looked grave.  But a mole, which he noticed close to her mouth on the countess’s left cheek, surprised him.  Nana had precisely the same mole.  It was curious.  Tiny hairs curled up on it, only they were golden in Nana’s case, black as jet in this.  Ah well, never mind!  This woman enjoyed nobody’s embraces.

“I have always felt a wish to know Queen Augusta,” she said.  “They say she is so good, so devout.  Do you think she will accompany the king?”

“It is not thought that she will, madame,” he replied.

She had no lovers:  the thing was only too apparent.  One had only to look at her there by the side of that daughter of hers, sitting so insignificant and constrained on her footstool.  That sepulchral drawing room of hers, which exhaled odors suggestive of being in a church, spoke as plainly as words could of the iron hand, the austere mode of existence, that weighed her down.  There was nothing suggestive of her own personality in that ancient abode, black with the damps of years.  It was Muffat who made himself felt there, who dominated his surroundings with his devotional training, his penances and his fasts.  But the sight of the little old gentleman with the black teeth and subtle smile whom he suddenly discovered in his armchair behind the group of ladies afforded him a yet more decisive argument.  He knew the personage.  It was Theophile Venot, a retired lawyer who had made a specialty of church cases.  He had left off practice with a handsome fortune and was now leading a sufficiently mysterious existence, for he was received everywhere, treated with great deference and even somewhat feared, as though he had been the representative of a mighty force, an occult power, which was felt to be at his back.  Nevertheless, his behavior was very humble.  He was churchwarden at the Madeleine Church and had simply accepted the post of deputy mayor at the town house of the Ninth Arrondissement in order, as he said, to have something to do in his leisure time.  Deuce take it, the countess was well guarded; there was nothing to be done in that quarter.