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The women stared. They smiled and cradled their young sons and kissed them on the cheeks. “You must not forget this, darling, what you see.” And little Jean or Claude or Michel or Philippe would approach the window, greatly daring, and promise to remember and press a cold nose to the glass.

They called their daughters also. “Come and watch this. Remember,” they said. The worldly ones—the eligible—gazed boldly down at his carriage; the modest averted their eyes. No window was unoccupied, no doorway empty where he passed. Old women peered through the folds of the drapes; old men muttered sagely or shook their powdered heads. Servants caught a glimpse, or tried to, jostling for position by the garden wall; the brazen ones braved passage in the street.

There his horses thundered: four white stallions draped in white. They did not require blinders; their manes and tails were clipped. Air escaping from the matched team’s nostrils plumed; black hooves struck sparks from the cobblestone paving. The coach doors bore his crest. His wheels were thrice the width of wheels on any other équipage, the felloes broad and stable, this effected to his satisfaction and by his own particular design; while clattering round the corner, in mud or snow, on hill or ice or thoroughfare, his conveyance did not lean.