Sabine Baring-Gould

“ Aunt Celestine had seen him contemplate the garden. She had seen him take down, load and prime, the pistol. Then she rushed down stairs to Madame de Montcontour.
She found James Asheton with her. The young English man had just called, and Madame la Baronne was hastily explaining to him the cause of her anxiety. In dashed Mdlle. de Pleurans with her eyes distended and her hands raised ‘Josephine! he has darkened the room! He has taken and cocked the pistol! ’
The baroness was frozen with terror. Even Asheton was mute with dismay. Aunt Celestine stood in the door looking from one to the other. ”

“ We shall see the lilies of Montcontour quartered, quartered for eternity, with three pots of Dundee marmalade, in chief—a cheese-scoop. Remember, my son, if she were not an heiress, her detestable modern arms—evoked from Heaven knows where—might pass away into nonentity, and be forgotten, but the arms of an heiress continue, quartered, in permanence, a perpetual glory, or an indelible stain.’
During dinner, after the baron’s return from Champclair, he said in a broken voice to his mother, ‘It is possible that Jacques Asheton may call on me this evening. If so—entertain him ”

“ The father of the young demoiselle was a grocer, and the mother was the niece of Mdlle. Painaulait, who had been the servant of Madame de Hoelgoet. Mrs Asheton concealed nothing, she insisted on the vulgarity of Mrs Fairbrother, and when asked about the daughter, shrugged her shoulders. It was to the interest of Mrs Asheton to set the baroness against Jacquetta, because Mrs Asheton, as a good mother, wanted the girl for her own son, and knew perfectly that the baron was his rival. Accordingly, when Alphonse announced to his mother that he desired to marry Mdlle. ”

“ Fareboutier, life has for me no charms, it is a horrible gulf of blackness irradiated by no star. My Jacquette is everything that is amiable, virtuous, noble, and beautiful; it is you, mother, who taught me to love virtue and admire the ideal in woman. It is because I have been thus inspired by you that I aspire to Mdlle. ”

“ Her poor Alphonse was more enamoured than she had supposed; it was really true that life would be a blank to him without that grocer’s daughter. Why had she been so abrupt with him 1 Why had she not dealt more skilfully with him and used her ingenuity to break through the engagement later on, instead of forbidding it bluntly at the outset, when he was in the first fervour of his passion?
‘Well—oh, Celestine! what is it?’ Mdlle. ”