Giselle looked very much astonished at this speech, and her air of disapproval amused Belle and Yvonne exceedingly.  They began presently to talk of the classes in which they were considered brilliant pupils, and of their success in compositions.  They said that sometimes very difficult subjects were given out.  A week or two before, each had had to compose a letter purporting to be from Dante in exile to a friend in Florence, describing Paris as it was in his time, especially the manners and customs of its universities, ending by some allusion to the state of matters between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.

“Good heavens!  And could you do it?” said Giselle, whose knowledge of history was limited to what may be found in school abridgments.

It was therefore a great satisfaction to her when Fred declared that he never should have known how to set about it.

“Oh! papa helped me a little,” said Isabelle, whose father wrote articles much appreciated by the public in the ‘Revue des Deux Mondes.’  “But he said at the same time that it was horrid to give such crack-brained stuff to us poor girls.  Happily, our subject this week is much nicer.  We have to make comparisons between La Tristesse d’Olympio, Souvenir, and Le Lac’.  That will be something interesting.”

“The Tristesse d’Olympio?” repeated Giselle, in a tone of interrogation.

“You know, of course, that it is Victor Hugo’s,” said Mademoiselle de Wermant, with a touch of pity.

Giselle answered with sincerity and humility, “I only knew that Le Lac was by Lamartine.”

“Well!—­she knows that much,” whispered Belle to Yvonne—­“just that much, anyhow.”

While they were whispering and laughing, Jacqueline recited, in a soft voice, and with feeling that did credit to her instructor in elocution, Mademoiselle X——­, of the Theatre Francais: 

     May the moan of the wind, the green rushes’ soft sighing,
     The fragrance that floats in the air you have moved,
     May all heard, may all breathed, may all seen, seem but trying
     To say:  They have loved.

Then she added, after a pause:  “Isn’t that beautiful?”

“How dares she say such words?” thought Giselle, whose sense of propriety was outraged by this allusion to love.  Fred, too, looked askance and was not comfortable, for he thought that Jacqueline had too much assurance for her age, but that, after all, she was becoming more and more charming.

At that moment Belle and Yvonne were summoned, and they departed, full of an intention to spread everywhere the news that Giselle, the little goose, had actually known that Le Lac had been written by Lamartine.  The Benedictine Sisters positively had acquired that much knowledge.

These girls were not the only persons that day at the reception who indulged in a little ill-natured talk after going away.  Mesdames d’Argy and de Monredon, on their way to the Faubourg St. Germain, criticised Madame de Nailles pretty freely.  As they crossed the Parc Monceau to reach their carriage, which was waiting for them on the Boulevard Malesherbes, they made the young people, Giselle and Fred, walk ahead, that they might have an opportunity of expressing themselves freely, the old dowager especially, whose toothless mouth never lost an opportunity of smirching the character and the reputation of her neighbors.