The babies’ vests were a strange accompaniment to Saint-Simon’s “Mémoires.” She found these on Giles’s shelves and asked Toppie if they would do. She had so often heard André de Valenbois and monsieur de Maubert and Maman quote Saint-Simon. Neither Toppie nor her father had read him and were quite contented with her choice, and she skipped about and found the people who most interested her. The French was strange, but it seemed to say more than modern French. The strangeness, she saw, was not apparent to Toppie and her father, nor was the acid irony nor the often unconscious humour. Toppie and her father rarely found anything to laugh at. Mr. Westmacott’s chief preoccupation was to follow the relationships of the characters and to place them correctly against the background of contemporaneous history, and for this purpose there were many interruptions while Toppie went to fetch the encyclopædia. Alix saw that Toppie sometimes listened with a vague distress. Saint-Simon and the people he wrote of were as alien to her understanding—to say nothing of her sympathies—as the Chinese. To Alix, for all the travesty of their tails and crests, they were clearly recognizable types. She saw the court of Louis Quatorze as a great golden aviary where splendid creatures, plumed, absurd, and beautiful, paced and preened and surreptitiously pecked at each other beneath the proud gaze of the monstrous bird of paradise on the throne. There was something sinister about them, there behind their bars; but something familiar and lovable too. Toppie only saw them as the denizens of a rather disagreeable fairy-tale, though at some moments of the recital, obscure to Alix, she saw that Toppie’s eyes rested upon her in a cogitativeness that seemed aware of too much reality. “They are all odious people, Alix,” she said to her one day. “Odious; vindictive; vulgar and wicked.” “Oh; but not all, Toppie. Some are very good, like Fénélon—though Saint-Simon is unfair to him; and some are charming, like the Duchess de Bourgogne. She was too fond of pleasure, perhaps; but she is so merry and amusing that one can forgive her that.” “Very much too fond, I am afraid,” said Toppie, colouring above her knitting. “I do not like her, Alix.” “If you feel the book unsuitable for our young friend, Toppie,” Mr. Westmacott observed, “why should we not read ‘Corinne’? I remember finding madame de Staël very interesting and any young girl could read her.” “But there are wicked people in all history,” cried Alix, aghast at this suggestion. “You all read Shakespeare, though he is full of wickedness. It is the point of view. The point of view of Saint-Simon is not wicked. He is ill-tempered, disagreeable, but upright; he means always to tell the truth. And then he was so devout, Monsieur; he was such a devout Christian.” This was wily of her, and Mr. Westmacott, easily reassured, agreed; “Yes, yes, I see that.”