The Short Reign of Pippin IV Read Online Free

took the métro.
    Sister Hyacinthe had been her childhood friend and moreover they had gone to school together. Suzanne Lescault was a pretty child, with a thin, true singing voice and a natural ability as a dancer so that she dominated the pageants and little plays of the school. Inevitably Suzanne rose from wood sprite to fairy queen to Pierrette, and later, for three successive years, she acted Joan the Maid to the complete satisfaction of its authoress, the Sister Superior. And Marie, who could neither sing nor dance, far from being jealous, adored her gifted friend and felt that she somehow participated in her triumphs.
    In the normal course of events Suzanne would have married and retired her talents and her blossoming figure. However, a distant manipulation of the Crédit Lyonnais and the subsequent suicide of her father, an officer in that organization, left Suzanne with a sickly mother, a dwarflike schoolboy brother in a black smock, and the necessity for making her way in the world. Only then did the often heard comment that she should be on the stage make some sense to Suzanne and more to her mother.
    The Comédie Française had no immediate openings but took her name, and while she waited Suzanne was employed by the Folies Bergère, where her voice, her grace, and her high and perfect bosom were instantly appreciated and utilized. Her mother’s professional illness, and her brother’s interminable education, followed by his death by misadventure with a motorcycle, made it economically unsound for Suzanne to jeopardize a permanent and well-paid position for the uncertainty of higher art.
    For many years she graced the stage of the Folies, not only in the line of lovely undressed girls, but also with speaking, singing, and dancing parts. After twenty years of complicated and complaining illness, her mother died without a single symptom. By this time Suzanne had become not only a performer but ballet mistress.
    She was very tired. Her bosom had remained high; her arches had fallen. She had lived a life of comparative virtue, as do most Frenchwomen. Indeed it is a matter of disillusion to young male Americans otherwise informed, to discover that the French are a moral people—judged, that is, by American country-club standards.
    Suzanne wanted to rest her feet. She left a world about which she knew perhaps too much and after a proper novitiate took the veil as Sister Hyacinthe in an order of contemplation which demanded a great deal of sitting down.
    As a nun Sister Hyacinthe radiated such peace and piety that she became an ornament to her order, while her knowledge and background made her both tolerant and helpful to younger sisters with troubles.
    During all the years of both her lives she had maintained contact with her old school friend Marie. Even between visits they kept up a detailed and dull correspondence, exchanging complaints and recipes. Marie still adored her talented and now saintly friend. It was perfectly natural that she called upon her in the matter of the camera.
    In the tidy and comfortable little visiting room of the convent near Vincennes, Marie said, “I am at my wit’s end. In most things M’sieur is as considerate as one could wish, but where his ill-named stars are concerned he pours out money like water.”
    Sister Hyacinthe smiled at her. “Why don’t you beat him?” she asked pleasantly.
    â€œPardon? Oh! I see you make a jollity. I assure you it is a serious matter. The cooperage at Auxerre—”
    â€œIs there food on the table, Marie? Is the rent paid? Have they cut off the electricity?”
    â€œIt is a matter of principle and of precedent,” said Marie a little stiffly.
    â€œMy dear friend,” said the nun, “did you come to me for advice or to complain?”
    â€œWhy, for advice of course. I never complain.”
    â€œOf course not,” said Sister Hyacinthe, and she continued softly, “I have known