"Well, what if he begins to be jealous, begins to insist... on goodness knows what—do you understand?"
"Oh, no, non, non, non! How dare he! I have taken precautions, you needn't be afraid. I have even made him sign some IOUS for Albert. The least thing—and he will be arrested; and he won't dare!"
"Well, marry him . . ."
The marriage was celebrated without any great pomp; it was a quiet family affair. Albert was invited and a few other intimate friends. Hortense, Cléopatra and company were studiously excluded. The bridegroom was extremely interested in his position. Blanche herself tied his cravat with her own hands, and pomaded his head: and in his swallow-tailed coat with his white tie he looked très comme il faut.
"Il est pourtant très comme il faut," Blanche herself observed to me, coming out of the General's room, as though the idea that the General was très comme il faut was a surprise even to her. Though I assisted at the whole affair as an idle spectator, yet I took so little interest in the details that I have to a great extent forgotten the course of events. I only remember that Blanche turned out not to be called "de Cominges", and her mamma not to be la veuve "Cominges", but "du Placet". Why they had been both "de Cominges" till then, I don't know. But the General remained very much pleased with that, and "du Placet" pleased him, in fact, better than "de Cominges". On the morning of the wedding, fully dressed for the part, he kept walking to and fro in the drawing-room, repeating to himself with a grave and important air, "Mlle. Blanche du Placet! Blanche du Placet, du Placet! . . . and his countenance beamed with a certain complacency. At church, before the maire, and at the wedding breakfast at home, he was not only joyful but proud. There was a change in both of them. Blanche, too, had an air of peculiar dignity.
"I shall have to behave myself quite differently now," she said to me, perfectly seriously: "mais vois-tu, I never thought of one very horrid thing: I even fancy, to this day, I can't learn my surname. Zagoryansky, Zagozyansky, Madame la Générale de Sago—Sago, ces diables de noms russes, enfin madame la générale a quartorze consonnés! Comme c'est agréable, n'est-ce pas?"
At last we parted, and Blanche, that silly Blanche, positively shed tears when she said good-bye to me. "Tu étais bon enfant," she said, whimpering. "Je te croyais bête et tu en avais l'air,
