Fortunately, however, as the carriage drew up, Modeste saw an old man, in a blond wig frizzed into little curls, whose calm, plump, smooth face wore a fatherly smile and an expression of monastic cheerfulness which the half-veiled glance of the eye rendered almost noble.  This was the Duc de Verneuil, master of Rosembray.  The duchess, a woman of extreme piety, the only daughter of a rich and deceased chief-justice, spare and erect, and the mother of four children, resembled Madame Latournelle,—­if the imagination can go so far as to adorn the notary’s wife with the graces of a bearing that was truly abbatial.

“Ah, good morning, dear Hortense!” said Mademoiselle d’Herouville, kissing the duchess with the sympathy that united their haughty natures; “let me present to you and to the dear duke our little angel, Mademoiselle de La Bastie.”

“We have heard so much of you, mademoiselle,” said the duchess, “that we were in haste to receive you.”

“And regret the time lost,” added the Duc de Verneuil, with courteous admiration.

“Monsieur le Comte de La Bastie,” said the grand equerry, taking the colonel by the arm and presenting him to the duke and duchess, with an air of respect in his tone and gesture.

“I am glad to welcome you, Monsieur le comte!” said Monsieur de Verneuil.  “You possess more than one treasure,” he added, looking at Modeste.

The duchess took Modeste under her arm and led her into an immense salon, where a dozen or more women were grouped about the fireplace.  The men of the party remained with the duke on the terrace, except Canalis, who respectfully made his way to the superb Eleonore.  The Duchesse de Chaulieu, seated at an embroidery-frame, was showing Mademoiselle de Verneuil how to shade a flower.

If Modeste had run a needle through her finger when handling a pin-cushion she could not have felt a sharper prick than she received from the cold and haughty and contemptuous stare with which Madame de Chaulieu favored her.  For an instant she saw nothing but that one woman, and she saw through her.  To understand the depths of cruelty to which these charming creatures, whom our passions deify, can go, we must see women with each other.  Modeste would have disarmed almost any other than Eleonore by the perfectly stupid and involuntary admiration which her face betrayed.  Had she not known the duchess’s age she would have thought her a woman of thirty-six; but other and greater astonishments awaited her.

The poet had run plump against a great lady’s anger.  Such anger is the worst of sphinxes; the face is radiant, all the rest menacing.  Kings themselves cannot make the exquisite politeness of a mistress’s cold anger capitulate when she guards it with steel armor.  Canalis tried to cling to the steel, but his fingers slipped on the polished surface, like his words on the heart; and the gracious face, the gracious words, the gracious bearing of the duchess hid the steel of her wrath, now fallen to twenty-five below zero, from all observers.  The appearance of Modeste in her sublime beauty, and dressed as well as Diane de Maufrigneuse herself, had fired the train of gunpowder which reflection had been laying in Eleonore’s mind.