The Last Duchess of Belgarde
Molly Elliot Seawell
9781465664648
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
In the great, green old garden of Madame, the Countess of Floramour, sat her granddaughter, little Mademoiselle Trimousette, wondering when she was to be married and to whom. Such an enterprise was afoot, and even then being arranged, but nobody, so far, had condescended to give Trimousette any of the particulars. She was stitching demurely at her tambour frame, while in her lap lay an open volume of Ronsard. Every now and then her rosy lips murmured the delicious verses of the poet. A very pale, quiet little person was Mademoiselle Trimousette, with a pair of tragic black eyes, and something in her air so soft, so pensive, so appealing, that it almost made up for the beauty she lacked. Although the only granddaughter of the rich, the highly born and the redoubtable Countess of Floramour, little Trimousette was the very soul of humility, and in her linen gown and straw hat might have passed for a shepherdess of Arcady. A clump of gnarled and twisted rose trees made a niche for her small white figure on the garden bench. To one side was the yew alley, where the clipped hedge met overhead, making the alley dark even in the May noontime. Before Trimousette stood, in a little open space, a cracked sundial, on which could still be made out in worn letters the legend: L’ombre passe, et repasse: Sans repasser, l’homme passe. This sounded very sad to little sixteen year old Trimousette; shadows passed and re passed; but men, passing once, passed forever. She sighed, and then her young heart turned away to sweeter, brighter things as she again took up her tambour frame. She knew the motto on the sundial well, did little Trimousette, but it always made her sad, from the time she first spelled it out in her childish days. However, her heart refused to give it more than one little sigh to day, as she turned again to her embroidery and to her love dream. If only she was to be married to the Duke of Belgarde—that splendid, daredevil duke, whom she had once seen face to face, and to whom she had yielded her innocent heart and all her glowing imagination! Her grandmother, the old countess, who was frightfully pious, probably would not let little Trimousette marry the duke, not even if he asked her; the Duke of Belgarde could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called a pious person. But Trimousette believed firmly that all the wild duke needed to make him a model of propriety was a little tender remonstrance and perhaps a kiss or two— Here Trimousette held her embroidery frame up to her eyes to hide the hot blushes that leaped into her pale cheeks.
