In her salon, hung with red damask, with curtains of the same lined
with silk, a fire on the hearth, a mantel-shelf adorned with bibelots
of the good time of Louis XV., and bearing candelabra in the form of
lilies upheld by Cupids--in this salon, filled with furniture in
gilded wood of the "pied de biche" pattern, it is not impossible to
understand why the people of Soulanges called the mistress of the
house, "The beautiful Madame Soulanges." The mansion had actually
become the civic pride of this capital of a canton.

If the leading society of the little town believed in its queen, the
queen as surely believed in herself. By a phenomenon not in the least
rare, which the vanity of mothers and authors carries on at all
moments under our very eyes in behalf of their literary works or their
marriageable daughters, the late Mademoiselle Cochet was, at the end
of seven years, so completely buried under Madame Soudry, the
mayoress, that she not only did not remember her past, but she
actually believed herself a well-bred woman. She had studied the airs
and graces, the dulcet tones, the gestures, the ways of her mistress,
so long that when she found herself in the midst of an opulence of her
own she was able to practice the natural insolence of it. She knew her
eighteenth century, and the tales of its great lords and all their
belongings, by heart. This back-stairs erudition gave to her
conversation a flavor of "oeil-de-boeuf"; her soubrette gossip passed
muster for courtly wit. Morally, the mayoress was, if you wish to say
so, tinsel; but to savages paste diamonds are as good as real ones.

The woman found herself courted and worshipped by the society in which
she lived, just as her mistress had been worshipped in former days.
She gave weekly dinners, with coffee and liqueurs to those who came in