His tender courtesy for these lonely women
seemed in some manner an evidence of that good old blood whereof the
young man's father boasted. Francis the First, who listened with bent
knee and bare head to his mother's discourse, was not more reverential to
that noble Savoyarde than was Gustave to the shabby-genteel maiden ladies
of the Pension Magnotte. In truth, this young man had a heart pitiful and
tender as the heart of woman. To be unfortunate was to possess a sure
claim upon his pity and regard; to be poor and friendless was the best
appeal to his kindness. He spent his evenings sometimes in the great
dreary desert of a salon, and listened respectfully while Mademoiselle
Servin, the young music-teacher, played dismal sonatas of Gluck or Gretry
on a cracked old piano that had been one of the earliest made of those
instruments, and was now attenuated and feeble as the very ghost of
music. He listened to Madame Magnotte's stories of departed splendour. To
him she opened her heart as she never had opened it to those other young
men.
"They mock themselves of everything--even the religion!" she exclaimed,
with horror. "They are Diderots and Holbachs in the bud, less the talent.
But you do not come of that gutter in which they were born. You are of
the old blood of France, M. Lenoble, and I can trust myself to you as I
cannot to them. I, who speak to you--I, too, come of a good old race, and
there is sympathy between we others.
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