Читать книгу The Complete Rougon-Macquart Cycle (All 20 Unabridged Novels in one volume) - Emile Zola - Страница 17

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There was a fancy-dress ball at the Saccard’s on the Thursday in midLent. The great event, however, of the evening was the poem of Les Amours du Beau Narcisse et de la Nymphe Écho, in three tableaux, which was to be performed by the ladies. The author of the poem, M. Hupel de la Noue, had for more than a month been journeying to and fro between his prefecture and the house in the Parc Monceau in order to superintend the rehearsals and give his advice on the costumes. He had at first thought of writing his work in verse; then he had decided in favour of the tableaux vivants; it was more dignified, he said, and came nearer to the classical ideal.

The ladies had no more rest. Some of them had no less than three changes of dress. There were endless conferences, over which the préfet presided. To begin with, the character of Narcissus was discussed at length. Was it to be enacted by a woman or by a man? At last, at Renée’s entreaties, it was decided that the part should be entrusted to Maxime; but he was to be the only man, and even then Madame de Lauwerens declared she would never have consented to this if “little Maxime had not been so like a real girl.” Renée was to be Echo. The question of the dresses was far more complicated. Maxime was of great assistance to the préfet, who was distracted in the midst of the nine women whose mad imaginations threatened seriously to compromise the purity of outline of his work. Had he listened to them, Olympus would have worn powdered hair. Madame d’Espanet wanted positively to have a train to her dress so as to hide her feet, which were a trifle large, while Madame Haffner had visions of herself clad in the skin of a wild beast. M. Hupel de la Noue was vehement; once he even grew angry; he had made up his mind; he said that the only reason why he had renounced verse was that he might write his poem “in cunningly-contrived fabrics and the most beautiful eclectic poses.”

“The general effect, mesdames,” he repeated at each fresh instance of unreasonableness, “you forget the general effect…. I can’t possibly spoil my whole work for the sake of the furbelows you ask me for.”

The conferences took place in the buttercup drawingroom. Whole afternoons were spent in settling the cut of a skirt. Worms was called in several times. At last all was arranged, the costumes decided on, the positions learnt, and M. Hupel de la Noue declared he was satisfied. Not even the election of M. de Mareuil had given him so much trouble.

Les Amours du Beau Narcisse et de la Nymphe Écho was to begin at eleven o’clock. At half-past ten the large drawingroom was full, and as there was to be a fancy-dress ball afterwards, the women had come in costume, and were seated on chairs ranged in a semicircle before the improvised stage, a platform hidden by two broad curtains of red velvet with a gold fringe, running on rods. The men stood at the back, or moved to and fro. At ten o’clock the upholsterers had driven the last nail. The platform was erected at the end of the long gallery of a drawingroom, and occupied a whole section of it. The stage was approached from the smoking-room, which had been converted into a greenroom for the actors. In addition, the ladies had a number of rooms at their disposal on the first floor, where an army of ladies’ maids laid out the costumes for the different tableaux.

It was half-past eleven, and the curtains were not yet drawn apart. A loud buzzing filled the drawingroom. The rows of chairs offered a bewildering display of marquises, noble dames, milkmaids, Spanish ladies, shepherdesses, sultanas; while the compact mass of dress-coats set a great black blotch beside that shimmering of bright stuffs and bare shoulders, all flashing with the bright scintillations of jewellery. The women alone were in fancy-dress. It was already getting warm. The three chandeliers lit up the golden flood of the drawingroom.

At last M. Hupel de la Noue was seen to emerge from an opening arranged on the left of the platform. He had been helping the ladies since eight o’clock in the evening. His dress-coat had on the left sleeve the mark of three white fingers, a small woman’s hand which had been laid there after dabbling in a box of rice-powder. But the préfet had other things to think of besides his dress! His eyes were dilated, his face swollen and rather pale. He seemed to see nobody. And advancing towards Saccard, whom he recognized among a group of serious men, he said to him in an undertone:

“Damn it all! Your wife has lost her girdle of leaves…. We’re in a pretty mess!”

He swore, he could have thumped people. Then, without waiting for a reply, without looking at anything, he turned his back, dived under the draperies, and disappeared. The ladies smiled at this queer apparition.

The group amid which Saccard was standing was clustered behind the last row of chairs. An armchair had even been drawn out of the row for the Baron Gouraud, whose legs had been swelling for some time past. There were there M. Toutin-Laroche, whom the Emperor had just created a senator; M. de Mareuil, whose second election the Chamber had deigned to confirm; M. Michelin, newly decorated; and, a little further back, the Mignon and Charrier couple, of whom one wore a big diamond in his necktie, while the other displayed a still bigger one on his finger. The gentlemen chatted together. Saccard left them for a moment to go and exchange a whispered word with his sister, who had just come in and was sitting between Louise de Mareuil and Madame Michelin. Madame Sidonie was disguised as a sorceress; Louise was jauntily attired in a page’s dress that made her look quite an urchin; the little Michelin, dressed as an alme, smiled amorously through her veils embroidered with threads of gold.

“Have you learnt anything?” Saccard softly asked his sister.

“No, not yet,” she replied. “But the spark must be here…. I’ll catch them tonight, make yourself easy.”

“Let me know at once, won’t you?”

And Saccard, turning to right and left, complimented Louise and Madame Michelin. He compared the latter to one of Mahomet’s houris, the former to a favourite of Henry III. His Provençal accent seemed to make the whole of his spare, strident figure sing with delight. When he returned to the group of serious men, M. de Mareuil took him aside and spoke to him of their children’s marriage. Nothing was altered, the contract was still to be signed on the following Sunday.

“Quite so,” said Saccard. “I intend even to announce the match to our friends this evening, if you see no objection…. I am only waiting for my brother the minister, who has promised to come.”

The new deputy was delighted. Meantime, M. Toutin-Laroche was raising his voice as though seized with lively indignation.

“Yes, messieurs,” he said to M. Michelin and the two contractors, who drew near, “I was goodnatured enough to allow my name to be mixed up in an affair like that.”

And as Saccard and Mareuil came up to them:

“I was telling these gentlemen the regrettable catastrophe of the Société Générale of the Ports of Morocco; you know, Saccard?”

The latter did not flinch. The company in question had just collapsed amid a terrible scandal. Over-inquisitive shareholders had insisted on learning what progress had been made with the establishment of the famous commercial stations on the Mediterranean sea-board, and a judicial enquiry had shown that the Ports of Morocco existed only on the plans of the engineers: very handsome plans hung on the walls of the Company’s offices. Since then M. Toutin-Laroche had been clamouring more loudly than the shareholders, waxing indignant, demanding that his name should be restored to him without a stain. And he made so much noise that the Government, in order to calm this useful man and restore him in the eyes of public opinion, decided to send him to the Senate. It was thus that he fished up the so greatly coveted seat, in an affair that had very nearly involved him in a criminal trial.

“It is very kind of you to be interested in that,” said Saccard, “when you can point to your great work, the Crédit Viticole, a concern that has emerged triumphantly from every crisis.”

“Yes,” murmured Mareuil, “that is an answer to everything.”

As a matter of fact the Crédit Viticole had just issued from a serious but carefully concealed embarrassment. A minister who was very tenderly disposed towards this financial institution, which held the Municipality of Paris by the throat, had forced on a bulling operation which M. Toutin-Laroche had turned to wonderfully good account. Nothing flattered him more sweetly than the praise bestowed upon the prosperity of the Crédit Viticole. As a rule he provoked it. He thanked M. de Mareuil with a glance, and bending over the Baron Gouraud, on whose armchair he was familiarly leaning, he asked him:

“Are you comfortable? You’re not too warm?”

The baron gave a slight grunt.

“He is breaking up, he is breaking up day by day,” added M. Toutin-Laroche, in an undertone, turning towards the other gentlemen.

M. Michelin smiled, threw down his eyelids from time to time, gently, so as to look at his red ribbon. The Mignon and Charrier couple, planted squarely upon their big feet, seemed much more at their ease in their dress-clothes since they had taken to wearing diamonds. However, it was nearly midnight, and the company was growing impatient; it was not so illbred as to murmur, but the fans fluttered more nervously, and the sound of conversations increased.

At last M. Hupel de la Noue reappeared. He had passed one shoulder through the narrow opening when he perceived Madame d’Espanet at length ascending the platform; the other ladies, already posed for the first picture, were only waiting for her. The préfet turned round, showing his back to the audience, and he could be seen talking to the marquise, who was concealed by the curtains. He lowered his voice, and with compliments blown from his fingertips, said:

“My congratulations, marquise. Your costume is delicious.”

“I have a much prettier one underneath!” replied she, bluntly, laughing in his face, so funny did he seem to her, buried as he was in draperies.

“Ah, charming, charming!” he murmured, with an air of rapture.

He dropped the corner of the curtain, he went and joined the group of serious men, desiring to enjoy his work. He was no longer the man running with haggard face in search of Echo’s girdle of leaves. He beamed, and panted, and wiped his forehead. He still had the mark of the little white hand on the sleeve of his coat; and moreover the thumb of his right-hand glove was stained with red at the tip; he had no doubt dipped his thumb into one of those ladies’ make-up boxes. He smiled, he fanned himself, he stammered out:

“She is adorable, enchanting, astounding!”

“Who is?” asked Saccard.

“The marquise. What do you think she said to me just now…?”

And he told the story. It was considered quite perfect. The gentlemen repeated it to one another. Even the dignified M. Haffner, who had drawn nearer, could not prevent himself from applauding. Meanwhile, a piano, which few of the people had noticed, began to play a waltz. Then there came a great silence. The waltz had endless, capricious variations; and a very soft phrase ever mounted from the keyboard, finishing in a nightingale’s trill; then deeper notes took up the theme, more slowly. It was very voluptuous. The ladies, their heads a little to one side, smiled. On the other hand the piano had put a sudden stop to M. Hupel de la Noue’s merriment. He looked anxiously towards the red velvet curtains, he said to himself that he ought to have posed Madame d’Espanet himself, as he had posed the others.

The curtains opened slowly, the piano resumed the waltz, with the soft pedal down. A murmur sped through the drawingroom. The ladies leant forward, the men stretched out their necks, whilst admiration displayed itself here and there by a word too loudly spoken, an unconscious sigh, a stifled laugh. This lasted for fully five minutes, under the glare of the three chandeliers.

M. Hupel de la Noue, relieved, beamed beatifically upon his poem. He could not resist the temptation to repeat to the people around him what he had been saying for a month past:

“I did think of doing it in verse…. But, don’t you agree with me, it’s more dignified like this….”

Then, while the waltz rose and fell in an endless lullaby, he explained. The Mignon and Charrier couple had drawn nearer and were listening attentively.

“You know the subject, don’t you? The beauteous Narcissus, son of the River Cephisus and of the Nymph Liriope, scorns the love of the Nymph Echo…. Echo was an attendant of Juno, whom she amused with her speeches while Jupiter was roving about the world…. Echo, daughter of the Air and the Earth, as you know….”

And he went into transports over the poetry of mythology. Then, more confidentially:

“I thought I might give rein to my imagination…. The Nymph Echo leads the beauteous Narcisse to Venus in a grotto on the seashore, so that the goddess may inflame him with her fire. But the goddess is powerless. The young man indicates by his attitude that he is not touched.”

The explanation was not out of place, for few of the spectators in the drawingroom understood the exact meaning of the groups. When the préfet had named the characters in an undertone the admiration increased. The Mignon and Charrier couple continued to stare with wide-open eyes. They had not understood.

On the platform, between the red velvet curtains, yawned a grotto. The scenery was made of silk stretched in large broken plaits, imitating the anfractuosity of rocks, upon which were painted shells, fishes and large sea-plants. The stage, broken up, rose in the shape of a hillock, and was covered with the same silk, upon which the scene-painter had depicted a fine sand ground, constellated with pearls and silver spangles. It was a retreat fit for a goddess. There on the top of the hillock, stood Mme. de Lauwerens as Venus; rather stout, wearing her pink tights with the dignity of an Olympian duchess, she interpreted her part of the Queen of Love with large, severe, devouring eyes. Behind her, showing only her mischievous head, her wings and her quiver, little Mme. Daste lent her smile to the amiable character of Cupid. Then on one side of the hillock, the three Graces, Mmes. de Guende, Teissière and de Meinhold, all in muslin, stood smiling and intertwined as in Pradier’s group; while on the other side, the Marquise d’Espanet and Mme. Haffner, enveloped in the same flow of lace, their arms round each other’s waists, their hair intermingled, gave a risky note to the picture, a reminiscence of Lesbos, which M. Hupel de la Noue explained in a lower voice, for the benefit of the men only, saying that he intended by this to show the extent of Venus’s power. At the foot of the hillock, the Countess Vanska impersonated Voluptuousness; she lay outstretched, twisted by a final spasm, her eyes half closed and languishing, as though satiated; very dark, she had unloosened her black hair, and her bodice, streaked with tawny flames, showed portions of her glowing skin. The scale of colour of the costumes, from the snowy white of Venus’s veil to the dark-red of Voluptuousness’ bodice, was soft, generally pink, flesh-coloured. And under the electric ray, ingeniously cast upon the stage from one of the garden windows, the gauze, the lace, all those light, diaphanous materials mingled so well with the shoulders and tights that those pink whitenesses seemed alive, and one was no longer certain that the ladies had not carried the plastic truth so far as to strip themselves quite naked.

All this was but the apotheosis; the play was enacted in the foreground. On the left Renée, as Echo, stretched out her arms towards the tall goddess, her head half turned towards Narcissus, pleadingly, as though to invite him to look at Venus, the mere sight of whom kindles such irresistible fires; but Narcissus, on the right, made a gesture of refusal, hid his eyes with his hand, remained cold as ice. The costumes of these two characters in particular had cost M. Hupel de la Noue’s imagination infinite trouble. Narcissus, as a wandering demigod of the forests, wore an ideal huntsman’s dress: green tights, a short, clinging jacket, a leafy twig of oak in his hair. The dress of Echo was quite an allegory in itself; it suggested tall trees and lofty mountains, the resounding spots where the voices of the Earth and the Air reply to each other; it was rock in the white satin of the skirt, thicket in the leaves of the girdle, clear sky in the cloud of blue gauze of the bodice. And the groups retained a statuesque immobility, the fleshly note of Olympus sang in the effulgence of the broad ray of light, while the piano continued its penetrating complaint of love, interspersed with deep sighs.

It was generally conceded that Maxime was beautifully made. In making his gesture of refusal, he accentuated his left hip, which was much noticed. But all the praise was for Renée’s expression of feature. In M. Hupel de la Noue’s phrase, she typified “the pangs of unsatisfied desire.” She wore a bitter smile that tried to look humble, she sought her prey with the entreaties of a she-wolf who but half hides her teeth. The first tableau went off well, but for that madcap of an Adeline, who moved and who scarcely repressed an irresistible desire to laugh. At last the curtains were closed, the piano ceased.

Then the audience applauded discreetly, and the conversations were resumed. A great breath of love, of restrained desire, had come from the nudities on the stage, and hovered through the drawingroom, where the women leaned more languidly in their seats, while the men spoke low in each other’s ears, with smiles. There was whispering as in an alcove, a well-bred semi-silence, a longing for voluptuousness barely formulated by a trembling of lips; and in the mute looks exchanged amid this decorous rapture there was the frank boldness of delights offered and accepted with a glance.

Endless judgments were passed on the ladies’ good points. Their costumes assumed an importance almost equal to that of their shoulders. When the Mignon and Charrier couple turned to question M. Hupel de la Noue, they were quite surprised to find him no longer beside them; he had already dived behind the platform.

“As I was telling you, my beautiful pet,” said Madame Sidonie, resuming a conversation interrupted by the first tableau, “I have received a letter from London, about that business of the three milliards, you know…. The person I employed to make enquiries writes that he thinks he has found the banker’s receipt. England must have paid…. It has made me ill all day.”

She was in fact yellower than usual, in her sorceress’s robe sprinkled with stars. And as Madame Michelin did not listen to her, she continued in a lower voice, muttering that it was impossible that England had paid, and that she should certainly go to London herself.

“Narcissus’ dress is very pretty, is it not?” asked Louise of Madame Michelin.

The latter smiled. She looked at the Baron Gouraud, who seemed quite cheerful again in his armchair. Madame Sidonie, observing the direction of her glance, leant over, whispered in her ear, so that the child might not hear:

“Has he settled up?”

“Yes,” replied the young woman, languishing, playing her alme part delightfully. “I have chosen the house at Louveciennes, and I have received the title-deeds from his man of business…. But we have broken off, I no longer see him.”

Louise was particularly sharp at catching what she was not intended to hear. She looked at the Baron Gouraud with a page’s boldness, and said quietly to Madame Michelin:

“Don’t you think the baron looks hideous?”

Then she added, with a burst of laughter:

“I say! they ought to have made him play Narcissus. He would have been delicious in apple-green tights.”

The sight of Venus, of this voluptuous corner of Olympus, had in fact revived the old senator. He rolled delighted eyes, turned half round to compliment Saccard. Amidst the buzz that filled the drawingroom, the group of serious men continued to talk business and politics. M. Haffner said he had just been appointed chairman of a jury charged with settling questions of indemnities. Then the conversation turned upon the works of Paris, upon the Boulevard du Prince-Eugène, which was beginning to be discussed seriously in public. Saccard seized the opportunity to speak of somebody he knew, a landlord who would no doubt be expropriated. And he looked the gentleman straight in the face. The baron slowly wagged his head; M. Toutin-Laroche went so far as to declare that there was nothing so unpleasant as to be expropriated; M. Michelin agreed, squinted more than ever as he looked at his decoration.

“The indemnity can never be too high,” learnedly concluded M. de Mareuil, who wished to please Saccard.

They had understood one another. But the Mignon and Charrier couple brought their own affairs forward. They meant to retire soon, they said, no doubt to Langres, keeping on an occasional lodging in Paris. They made the other gentlemen smile when they related how, after completing the building of their magnificent mansion in the Boulevard Malesherbes, they had thought it so handsome that they had not been able to resist the longing to sell it. Their diamonds must have been a consolation that they had offered themselves. Saccard laughed with a bad grace; his former partners had just realized enormous profits in an affair in which he had played the part of a dupe. And as the entr’acte grew longer, phrases in praise of Venus’s bosom and Echo’s costume penetrated through the conversation of the serious men.

After more than half an hour, M. Hupel de la Noue reappeared. He was on the high road to success, and the disorder of his attire increased. As he regained his place, he came across M. de Mussy. He shook hands with him in passing; then he turned back and asked him:

“Haven’t you heard what the marquise said?”

And, without waiting for his reply, he told him the story. He appreciated it more and more, he criticized it, he ended by thinking it exquisite in its candour. “I have a much prettier one underneath!” It was a cry from the heart.

But M. de Mussy did not hold the same opinion. He considered the remark indecent. He had just been attached to the London embassy, where the minister had told him that an austere demeanour was expected. He refused to lead the cotilon, he made himself old, he no longer spoke of his love for Renée, to whom he bowed gravely when he met her.

M. Hupel de la Noue had come up to the group standing behind the baron’s armchair, when the piano struck up a triumphal march. A loud burst of harmony, produced by masterful strokes on the keyboard, preluded a full melody in which a metallic clang at intervals resounded. As each phrase was finished, it was repeated in a higher key that accentuated the rhythm. It was at once fierce and joyous.

“You will see,” murmured M. Hupel de la Noue; “I have perhaps carried poetic licence rather far, but I think my audacity has succeeded…. The nymph Echo, seeing that Venus is powerless over the beauteous Narcissus, leads him to Plutus, the god of wealth and precious metals…. After the temptation of the flesh, the temptation of riches.”

“That’s very classical,” replied the spare M. Toutin-Laroche, with an amiable simper. “You know your period, monsieur the préfet.”

The curtains parted, the piano played more loudly. It was a dazzling picture. The electric ray fell on a blazing splendour in which the spectators at first saw nothing but a brazier, in which precious stones and ingots of gold seemed to be fusing. A new grotto was shown; but this was not the cool retreat of Venus, lapped by the waters eddying on fine sand sprinkled with pearls, but one situated seemingly in the centre of the earth, in a nether, fiery region, a fissure of the hell of antiquity, a crevice in a mine of molten metals inhabited by Plutus. The silk simulating the rock showed broad threads of metal, layers that looked like the veins of the primeval world, loaded with riches incalculable and the eternal life of the soil. On the ground, thanks to a bold anachronism of M. Hupel de la Noue’s, lay an avalanche of twenty-franc pieces, louis spread-out, louis heaped-up, a swarm of ascending louis.

On the top of this heap of gold sat Mme. de Guende, as Plutus, a female Plutus, a Plutus showing her bosom set in the great stripes of her dress which imitated all the metals. Around the god, erect, reclining, grouped in clusters, blooming apart, were posed the fairylike flora of this grotto, into which the caliphs of the Arabian Nights seemed to have emptied their treasures: Mme. Haffner, as Gold, with a stiff and resplendent skirt like a bishop’s cope; Mme. d’Espanet, as Silver, gleaming like moonlight; Mme. de Lauwerens, in bright blue, as a Sapphire, with by her side little Mme. Daste, a smiling Turquoise in tenderest blue; then there followed an Emerald, Mme. de Meinhold; a Topaz, Mme. Teissière; and lower down, the Comtess Vanska, lending her dark ardour to a Coral, recumbent, with raised arms loaded with rosy pendants, resembling a monstrous, seductive polyp which displayed a woman’s flesh amidst the yawning pink pearliness of its shell. These ladies wore necklaces, bracelets, complete sets of jewels, formed of the precious stones they respectively impersonated. Especially noticeable were the quaint ornaments of Mmes. d’Espanet and Haffner, contrived entirely of small gold coins and small silver coins fresh from the mint. In the foreground the story remained unchanged: the Nymph Echo still tempted the beauteous Narcissus, who refused with the same gesture. And the eyes of the spectators grew accustomed with delight to this yawning cavity opening on to the inflamed bowels of the earth, to this heap of gold on which lay sprawling the riches of a world.

This second tableau was still more successful than the first. It seemed particularly ingenious. The audacity of the twenty-franc pieces, this stream from a modern safe that had fallen into a corner of Greek mythology, enchanted the imagination of the ladies and financiers present. The words, “What a heap of pieces! what a lot of money!” flitted around, with smiles, with long quivers of satisfaction; and assuredly each of those ladies, each of those gentlemen, dreamt of owning all this money himself, coffered in his cellar.

“England has paid up; there are your milliards,” maliciously whispered Louise in Mme. Sidonie’s ear.

And Mme. Michelin, her mouth slightly parted with enraptured desire, threw back her alme’s veil, fondled the gold with glittering eyes, while the group of serious men went into transports. M. Toutin-Laroche, beaming all over, whispered a few words in the ear of the baron, whose face was becoming mottled with yellow patches. But the Mignon and Charrier couple, less discreet, said with coarse candour:

“Damn it! there’s enough there to pull down all Paris and build it up again.”

The remark seemed a deep one to Saccard, who began to suspect that the Mignon and Charrier pair made fun of people under the guise of idiocy. When the curtains once more fell to, and the piano finished its triumphal march with a loud tumult of notes thrown pellmell, like last shovelfuls of crown-pieces, the applause burst forth louder, more prolonged.

Meantime, in the middle of the tableau, the minister, accompanied by his secretary, M. de Saffré, had appeared at the door of the drawingroom. Saccard, who was impatiently looking out for his brother, wanted to rush forward to welcome him. But the latter, with a movement of the hand, begged him not to stir. And he slowly approached the group of serious men. When the curtains had closed, and he was recognized, a long whisper travelled round the drawingroom, all heads looked round: the minister counterbalanced the success of Les Amours du Beau Narcisse et de la Nymphe Écho.

“You are a poet, monsieur préfet,” he said, smiling, to M. Hupel de la Noue. “You once published a volume of verse, Les Volubilis, I believe?… I see the cares of administration have not drained your imagination.”

The préfet detected, in this compliment, the sting of an epigram. The sudden advent of his chief disconcerted him, the more so as, on giving a glance to see if his dress was in order, he noticed on the sleeve of his coat the little white hand, which he did not dare to brush off. He bowed, stammered.

“Really,” continued the minister, addressing M. Toutin-Laroche, the Baron Gouraud, the other personages present, “all that gold was a wonderful spectacle…. We should be able to do great things if M. Hupel de la Noue would coin money for us.”

This was, in ministerial language, the same remark as that of the Mignon and Charrier couple. Then M. Toutin-Laroche and the others paid their court, rung the changes on the minister’s last phrase: the Empire had done wonders already; it was not gold that was wanting, thanks to the great experience of the government; never had France stood so high in the councils of Europe; and the gentlemen ended by uttering such platitudes that the minister himself changed the conversation. He listened to them with his head erect, the corners of his mouth a little raised, which gave to his fat, white, cleanshaven face an expression of dubiousness and smiling disdain.

Saccard manœuvred so as to find an excuse to change the subject and to make his announcement of the marriage of Maxime and Louise. He assumed an air of great familiarity, and his brother, with mock geniality, was goodnatured enough to help him by pretending great affection for him. He was really the superior of the two, with his steady gaze, his evident contempt for petty rascality, his broad shoulders, which, with a shrug, could have floored all that crew. When at last the marriage came into question, he became charming, he let it be understood that he had his wedding-present ready; he was so good as to talk of Maxime’s being appointed an auditor to the Council of State. He went so far as twice to repeat to his brother, with an air of absolute good-fellowship:

“Tell your son I will be his witness.”

M. de Mareuil crimsoned with delight. Saccard was congratulated. M. Toutin-Laroche offered himself as a second witness. Then, suddenly, they began to talk of divorce. A member of the opposition, said M. Haffner, had just had “the lamentable audacity” to defend this social scandal. And every one protested. Their sense of propriety found vent in profound observations. M. Michelin smiled faintly upon the minister, while the Mignon and Charrier couple noted with astonishment that the collar of his dress-coat was worn.

Meanwhile M. Hupel de la Noue remained ill at ease, leaning against the armchair of the Baron Gouraud, who had contented himself with silently shaking hands with the minister. The poet dared not leave the spot. An indefinable feeling, the dread of appearing ridiculous, the fear of losing the good graces of his chief detained him, despite his furious desire to go and pose the ladies on the stage for the last tableau. He waited for some happy remark to occur to him and restore him to favour. But he could think of nothing. He felt more and more embarrassed when he perceived M. de Saffré; he took his arm, hooked himself on to him as to a live-saving plank. The young man had just arrived, he was a fresh victim.

“Haven’t you heard what the marquise said?” asked the préfet.

But he was so perturbed that he no longer knew how to put the story spicily. He floundered.

“I said to her, ‘You have a charming costume’; and she replied….”

“‘I have a much prettier one underneath,’“ quietly added M. de Saffré. “It’s old, my dear sir, very old.”

M. Hupel de la Noue looked at him in consternation. The repartee was an old one, and he was just about still more deeply to penetrate into his commentary on the candour of this cry from the heart!

“Old,” replied the secretary, “old as the hills: Mme. d’Espanet has already said it twice at the Tuileries.”

This was the last straw. What did the Préfet care now for the minister, for the whole drawingroom? He turned to go towards the stage, when the piano played a prelude, in a sad tone, with the trembling of notes that weep; then the plaintive strain expanded, dragged on at length, and the curtains parted. M. Hupel de la Noue, who had already half disappeared, returned to the drawingroom when he heard the soft grating of the curtain-rings. He was pale, exasperated; he made a violent effort to keep himself from apostrophizing the ladies. They had posed themselves without him! It must have been that little d’Espanet woman who had egged them on to hasten the changes of dress and dispense with his assistance. It was all wrong, it was worth nothing at all!

He returned, mumbling inarticulate words. He looked at the stage, shrugging his shoulders, muttering:

“Echo is too near the edge…. And Narcissus’s leg, it’s not dignified, not dignified in the least ….”

The Mignon and Charrier couple, who had drawn near in order to hear “the explanation,” ventured to ask him “What the young man and the young girl were doing, lying down on the ground.” But he made no reply, he refused to explain his poem any further; and as the contractors insisted:

“Why, it no longer concerns me, since those ladies choose to hurt my neck so.”

The piano sobbed softly. On the stage, a glade, into which the electric ray threw a sheet of sunlight, revealed a vista of foliage. It was an ideal glade, with blue trees, big yellow and red flowers, that rose as high as the oaks. There, on a grassy mound, lay Venus and Plutus, side by side, surrounded by nymphs who had hastened from the neighbouring thickets to serve as their escort. There were daughters of the trees, daughters of the springs, daughters of the mountains, all the laughing, naked divinities of the forest. And the god and goddess triumphed, punished the indifference of the proud one who had scorned them, while the group of nymphs looked on curiously and with pious affright at the vengeance of Olympus in the foreground. There the drama was unfolded. The beauteous Narcissus, lying on the margin of a brook that came down from the back of the stage, was contemplating himself in the limpid mirror; and realism had been carried so far that a strip of real looking-glass had been placed at the bottom of the brook. But he had already ceased to be the free stripling, the forest wanderer. Death surprised him in the midst of his rapt admiration of his own image, Death enervated him, and Venus, with outstretched finger, like a fairy in a transformation-scene, hurled the fatal doom at his head. He was turning into a flower. His limbs became verdant, elongated, in his tight-fitting dress of green satin; the flexible stalk, formed by his legs slightly bent, was on the point of sinking into the ground and taking root, while his body, adorned with broad lappets of white satin, blossomed into a wondrous corolla. Maxime’s fair hair completed the illusion, and with its long curls set yellow pistils amid the whiteness of the petals. And the great nascent flower, still human, inclined its head towards the spring, its eyes moistened, its countenance smiling with voluptuous ecstasy, as though the beauteous Narcissus had at last in death satisfied the passion with which he had inspired himself. A few paces off the nymph Echo was dying also, dying of unquenched desire; she found herself little by little caught in the hardness of the ground, she felt her burning limbs freezing and hardening. She was no vulgar moss-stained rock, but one of white marble, through her arms and shoulders, through her long snow-white robe, from which the girdle of leaves and the blue drapery had glided down. Sinking amid the satin of her skirt, which was creased in large folds, like a block of Parian marble, she threw herself back, retaining nothing of life, in her cold sculptured body, save her woman’s eyes, eyes that gleamed, fixed on the flower of the waters, reclining languidly above the mirror of the spring. And it already seemed as if all the love-sounds of the forest, the long-drawn voices of the thickets, the mystic shivers of the leaves, the deep sighs of the tall oaks, came and beat upon the marble flesh of the Nymph Echo, whose heart, still bleeding within the block, resounded evermore, repeating afar the slightest complaints of Earth or Air.

“Oh, how they have rigged out that poor Maxime!” murmured Louise. “And Madame Saccard, she looks like a corpse.”

“She is covered with rice-powder,” said Madame Michelin.

Other remarks flitted about of a hardly complimentary nature. This third tableau had not the unqualified success of the two others. And yet it was this tragic ending that filled M. Hupel de la Noue with enthusiasm for his own talent. He admired himself in it as did his Narcissus in his strip of looking-glass. He had put into it a crowd of poetical and philosophical allusions. When the curtains were closed for the last time, and the spectators had applauded in a well-bred way, he felt a mortal regret at having yielded to anger and not explained the last page of his poem. Then he essayed to give to the people about him the key to the charming, grandiose, or simply naughty ideas represented by the beauteous Narcissus and the Nymph Echo, and he even tried to say what Venus and Plutus were doing at the bottom of the glade; but these ladies and gentlemen, whose clear, practical minds had understood the grotto of flesh and the grotto of gold, did not care to go into the préfet’s mythological complications. Only the Mignon and Charrier couple, who had made up their minds to know, had the goodnature to question him. He took possession of them, and kept them standing for nearly two hours in a window-recess while he related to them Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”

Meantime the minister departed. He apologized for not being able to stay and compliment the beautiful Madame Saccard on the perfect grace of her Nymph Echo. He had gone three or four times round the drawingroom on his brother’s arm, shaking hands with people, bowing to the ladies. Never had he compromised himself so much for Saccard. He left him radiant when, on the threshold, he said to him in a loud voice:

“I shall expect you tomorrow morning. Come to breakfast.”

The ball was about to begin. The servants had ranged the ladies’ chairs along the walls. The large drawingroom now displayed, from the small yellow drawingroom to the stage, its bare carpet, whose big purple flowers opened out under the dripping light that fell from the crystal of the chandeliers. The heat increased, the reflection of the red hangings burnished the gilt of the furniture and the ceiling. To open the ball they were waiting for the ladies, the Nymph Echo, Venus, Plutus and the rest, to change their costumes.

Madame d’Espanet and Madame Haffner were the first to appear. They had resumed the dresses they wore in the second tableau; one was Gold, the other Silver. They were surrounded, congratulated; and they related their emotions.

“As for me, I almost exploded with laughter,” said the marquise, “when I saw M. Toutin-Laroche’s big nose looking at me from the distance!”

“I believe I’ve got a crick in my neck,” drawled the fair-haired Suzanne. “No, on my word, if it had lasted a minute longer, I would have put my head back into a natural position, it pose without consulting me!”

From the recess into which he had driven the Mignon and Charrier couple, M. Hupel de la Noue cast restless glances at the group formed around the two ladies; he feared he was being ridiculed. The other nymphs arrived one after the other; all had resumed their costumes as precious stones; the Comtesse Vanska, as Coral, achieved a stupendous success when the ingenious details of her dress were closely examined. Then Maxime entered, faultless in dress-clothes, with a smiling air; and a flow of women enveloped him, he was placed in the centre of the circle, he was joked about his floral character, about his passion for mirrors; while he, unembarrassed, as though delighted with his part, continued to smile, joked back, confessed that he adored himself, and that he was sufficiently cured of women to prefer himself to them. The laughter grew louder, the group grew larger, took up the whole of the middle of the drawingroom, while the young man, lost in this mob of shoulders, in this medley of dazzling costumes, retained his fragrance of depraved love, the gentleness of a pale, vicious flower.

But when Renée at length came down, there was a semi-silence. She had put on a new costume of such original grace and so audacious that the ladies and the men, however accustomed to her eccentricities, gave a sudden movement of surprise. She was dressed as an Otaheitan belle. This dress, it would seem, is by way of being very primitive: a pair of soft tinted tights, that reached from her feet to her breasts, leaving her arms and shoulders bare, and over these tights a simple muslin blouse, short, and trimmed with two flounces so as to hide the hips a little. A wreath of wild flowers in her hair; gold bangles on her wrists and ankles. And nothing more. She was naked. The tights had the suppleness of flesh under the muslin blouse; the pure naked outline was visible, vaguely bedimmed by the flounces from the armpits to the knees, but at the slightest movement reappearing and accentuating itself between the meshes of the lace. She was an adorable savage, a barbarous and voluptuous wanton, barely hidden beneath a white haze, a blurr of sea-fog, beneath which her whole body could be divined.

Renée, with rosy cheeks, came briskly forward. Céleste had managed to split the first pair of tights; fortunately Renée, foreseeing this eventuality, had taken her precautions. The torn tights had delayed her. She seemed to care little for her triumph. Her hands burned, her eyes glittered with fever. She smiled, however, answered briefly the men who stopped her, who complimented her on the chasteness of her attitudes in the tableaux-vivants. She left in her wake a trail of dress-coats astounded and charmed at the transparency of her muslin blouse. When she had reached the group of women surrounding Maxime, she occasioned short cries of admiration, and the marquise began to eye her from head to foot, amorously murmuring:

“She is deliciously made.”

Madame Michelin, whose alme dress became hideously ponderous beside this simple veil, pursed her lips, while Madame Sidonie, shrivelled up in her black sorceress’s dress, whispered in her ear:

“It’s the height of indecency: don’t you think so, you beautiful thing?”

“Well!” said the pretty brunette at last, “how angry M. Michelin would be if I undressed myself like that.”

“And quite right too,” concluded the business woman.

The band of serious men was not of this opinion. They indulged in ecstasies at a distance. M. Michelin, whom his wife had so inappropriately quoted, went into transports, in order to please M. Toutin-Laroche and the Baron Gouraud, whom the sight of Renée enraptured. Saccard was greatly complimented on the perfection of his wife’s figure. He bowed, he professed to be very much overcome. The evening was an auspicious one for him, and but for a preoccupation that flitted through his eyes at moments when he threw a rapid glance towards his sister, he would have appeared perfectly happy.

“I say, she never showed us so much as that before,” said Louise, jestingly, in Maxime’s ear, glancing towards Renée.

She corrected herself, and added, with a mystifying smile:

“At least, to me.”

The young man looked at her with an air of alarm, but she continued smiling, comically, like a schoolboy delighted with a rather broad joke.

The ball began. The stage of the tableaux-vivants had been utilized to accommodate a small band, in which brass predominated; and the clear notes of the horns and cornets rang out in the ideal forest with the blue trees. First came a quadrille: “Ah, il a des bottes, il a des bottes, Bastien!” which was at that time sending the ballrooms into raptures. The ladies danced. Polkas, waltzes, mazurkas alternated with the quadrilles. The swinging couples passed and repassed, filling the long gallery, bounding beneath the lash of the brass, swaying to the lullaby of the violins. The fancy dresses, this flow of women of every country and of every period, rocked to and fro in a swarming medley of bright materials. After mingling and carrying off the colours in cadenced confusion, the rhythm, at certain strokes of the bow, abruptly brought back the same pink satin tunic, the same blue velvet bodice, side by side with the same black coat. Then another stroke of the bows, a blast of the cornets pushed the couples on, made them travel in files around the drawingroom with the swinging motion of a rowing-boat drifting under the impulse of the wind, which has snapped her painter. And so on, endlessly, for hours. Sometimes, between two dances, a lady went up to a window, suffocating, to inhale a little of the icy air; a couple rested on a sofa in the small buttercup drawingroom or went into the conservatory, strolling slowly round the pathways. Skirts, their edges alone visible, wore languid smiles under the arbours of creepers, in the depths of the tepid shadow, where the forte notes of the cornets penetrated during the quadrilles of “Ohé les p’tits agneaux!” and “J’ai un fled qui r’mue!”

When the servants opened the door of the dining-room, transformed into a refreshment buffet, with sideboards against the walls and a long table in the middle, laden with cold things, there was a push and a crush. A fine tall man, who had bashfully kept his hat in his hand, was so violently flattened against the wall that the wretched hat burst with a pitiful moan. This made the others laugh. They rushed at the pastry and the truffled game, brutally digging their elbows into one another’s sides. It was a sack, hands met in the middle of dishes, and the lackeys did not know to whom to attend of this band of well-bred men, whose outstretched arms expressed the one fear of arriving too late and finding the dishes empty. An old gentleman grew angry because there was no claret, and champagne, he maintained, kept him awake.

“Gently, messieurs, gently,” said Baptiste, in his serious voice. “There will be enough for every one.”

But nobody listened. The dining-room was full, and anxious dress-coats stood on tiptoe at the door. Before the sideboards stood groups, eating quickly, crowding together. Many swallowed their food without drinking, not having been able to lay their hands on a glass. Others, on the contrary, drank and sought fruitlessly for a morsel of bread.

“Listen,” said M. Hupel de la Noue, whom the Mignon and Charrier couple, sick of mythology, had dragged to the supper-room, “we shan’t get a thing if we don’t club together…. It’s much worse at the Tuileries, and I’ve gained experience there…. You look after the wine, I’ll see to the solids.”

The préfet had his eye on a leg of mutton. He stretched out his arm at the right moment through a break in the shoulders, and quietly carried it off, after stuffing his pockets with rolls. The contractors returned on their side, Mignon with one bottle, Charrier with two bottles of champagne; but they had only been able to find two glasses; they said that didn’t matter, they would drink out of the same. And the party supped off the corner of a flower-stand, at the end of the room. They did not even take off their gloves, but put the slices already cut from the leg of mutton between their bread, and kept the bottles under their arms. And standing up, they talked with their mouths full, stretching out their chins beyond their waistcoats so as to let the gravy fall on the carpet.

Charrier, having finished his wine before his bread, asked a servant to get him a glass of champagne.

“You will have to wait, monsieur!” angrily replied the scared domestic, losing his head, forgetting that he was not in the kitchen. “They have drunk up three hundred bottles already.”

Meantime the notes of the band could be heard swelling with sudden gusts. They were dancing the Kisses Polka, famous at public balls, the rhythm of which each dancer had to mark by saluting his partner. Mme. d’Espanet appeared at the door of the dining-room, flushed, her hair a little disarranged, trailing her long silver dress with a charming air of lassitude. Hardly any one moved aside, she was obliged to push with her elbows to effect a passage. Then she came straight up to M. Hupel de la Noue, who had finished, and who was wiping his mouth with his handkerchief.

“It would be so good of you, monsieur,” she said with a bewitching smile, “if you would find me a chair. I have been all round the table in vain….”

The prefet had a grudge against the marquise, but his gallantry gave him no alternative: he bustled about, found the chair, installed Mme. d’Espanet, and stayed behind her to wait on her. She would only take a few prawns, with a little butter, and half a glass of champagne. She ate daintily amid the gluttony of the men. The table and the chairs were reserved exclusively for the ladies. But an exception was always made in favour of the Baron Gouraud. There he was, comfortably seated in front of a piece of game-pie of which his jaws were slowly munching the crust. The marquise re-subjugated the préfet by telling him that she would never forget her artistic emotions in Les Amours du Beau Narcisse et de la Nymphe Écho. She even explained to him why they had not waited for him, in a way that completely consoled him: the ladies, on learning that the minister was there, thought it would not be very proper to prolong the entr’acte. She ended by begging him to go and look for Mme. Haffner, who was dancing with Mr. Simpson, a brute of a man, she said, whom she disliked. And when Suzanne had come, she no longer had an eye for M. Hupel de la Noue.

Saccard, followed by MM. Toutin-Laroche, de Mareuil, Haffner, had taken possession of a sideboard. As there was no room at the table, and M. de Saffré passed with Madame Michelin on his arm, he stopped them and insisted that the pretty brunette should join his party. She nibbled at some pastry, smiling, raising her bright eyes to the five men who surrounded her. They leant over her, touched her alme’s veils embroidered with threads of gold, drove her up against the sideboard against which she ended by leaning, taking cakes from every hand, very gently and very caressing, with the amorous docility of a slave amid her masters. M. Michelin, all alone at the other end of the room, was finishing up a pot of pâté de foie gras which he had succeeded in capturing.

Meantime Mme. Sidonie, who had been prowling about ever since the first strokes of the bow had opened the ball, entered the dining-room and beckoned to Saccard with a glance.

“She is not dancing,” she said, in a low voice. “She seems restless. I believe she is meditating something desperate…. But I have not yet been able to discover the spark…. I must have something to eat and return to the watch.”

And standing up, like a man, she ate a wing of a chicken which she got M. Michelin, who had finished his pâté, to give her. She poured herself out a large champagne-glass full of malaga, and then, after wiping her lips with her fingers, she returned to the drawingroom. The train of her sorceress’s dress seemed already to have gathered up all the dust of the carpets.

The ball grew languid, the band was showing signs of fatigue, when a murmur circulated: “The cotillon! the cotillon!” putting fresh life into the dancers and the brass. Couples came from all the shrubberies in the hothouse; the large drawingroom filled up as for the first quadrille; and there was a discussion among the awakened crowd. It was the last flicker of the ball. The men who were not dancing watched with limp goodnature from the depths of the window-recesses the talkative group swelling in the middle of the room; while the supper-eaters in the next room stretched out their necks to see, without relinquishing their food.

“M. de Mussy says he won’t,” said a lady. “He swears he never leads the cotillon now…. Come, just once more, Monsieur de Mussy, only this little once. Do, to oblige us.”

But the young attaché remained stiff and serious in his stick-up collar. It was really impossible, he had taken a vow. Disappointment followed. Maxime refused also, saying that he could not possibly, that he was worn out. M. Hupel de la Noue dared not offer his services; his frivolity stopped at poetry. A lady suggesting Mr. Simpson was promptly silenced; Mr. Simpson was the most extraordinary cotillon-leader you ever saw; he gave himself over to fantastic and mischievous devices; at one dance where they had been so imprudent as to select him, it was said that he had compelled the ladies to jump over the chairs, and one of his favourite figures was to make everybody go round the room on all-fours.

“Has M. de Saffré gone?” asked a childish voice.

He was just going, he was saying goodbye to the beautiful Madame Saccard, with whom he was on the best of terms since she had refused to have anything to do with him. The amiable sceptic admired the caprices of others. He was brought back in triumph from the hall. He resisted, he said with a smile that they were compromising him, that he was a serious man. Then, in presence of all the white hands stretched out to him:

“Come,” said he, “take your positions…. But I warn you, I belong to the old school. I haven’t two farthings’ worth of imagination.”

The couples sat down around the room, on all the seats that could be gathered together; young men were even sent to fetch the iron chairs from the hothouse. It was a monster cotillon. M. de Saffré, who wore the rapt expression of a celebrant, chose for his partner the Comtesse Vanska, whose Coral dress fascinated him. When everybody was in position, he cast a long look at this circular row of skirts, each flanked by a dress-coat. And he nodded to the orchestra, whose brass resounded. Heads leaned forward along the smiling line of faces.

Renée refused to take part in the cotillon. She had been nervously gay since the commencement of the ball, scarcely dancing, mingling with the groups, unable to remain still. Her friends thought her odd. She had talked, during the evening, of making a balloon journey with a celebrated aeronaut in whom all Paris was interested. When the cotillon began, she was annoyed at no longer being able to walk about at her ease, she stationed herself at the door leading to the hall, shaking hands with the men who were leaving, talking with her husband’s familiars. The Baron Gouraud, whom a lackey was carrying off in his fur cloak, found a last word of praise for Renée’s Otaheitan dress.

Meanwhile, M. Toutin-Laroche shook Saccard’s hand.

“Maxime reckons on you,” said the latter.

“Quite so,” replied the new senator.

And turning to Renée:

“Madame, I have forgotten to congratulate you…. So the dear boy is settled now!”

And as she gave a surprised smile:

“My wife doesn’t know yet,” said Saccard…. “We have this evening decided on the marriage between Mademoiselle de Mareuil and Maxime.”

She continued smiling, bowing to M. Toutin-Laroche, who went off saying:

“You sign the contract on Sunday, don’t you? I am going to Nevers on some mining business, but I shall be back in time.”

Renée remained alone for a moment in the middle of the hall. She smiled no longer; and as she more deeply realized what she had just been told, she was seized with a great shiver. She looked with a fixed stare at the red velvet hangings, the rare plants, the majolica vases. Then she said out aloud:

“I must speak to him.”

And she returned to the drawingroom. But she had to stay in the doorway. A figure of the cotillon barred the way. The band played a soft waltz-movement. The ladies, holding each other’s hands, formed a ring like one of those rings of little girls singing, “Giro flé giro fla” and they danced round as quickly as possible, pulling at each other’s arms, laughing, gliding. In the centre a gentleman — it was that mischievous Mr. Simpson — held a long pink scarf in his hand; he raised it, with the gesture of a fisherman about to cast his net; but he did not hurry, he seemed to think it amusing to let those ladies dance round and tire themselves. They panted and begged for mercy. Then he threw the scarf, and he threw it with such skill that it went and wound round the shoulders of Madame d’Espanet and Madame Haffner, who were dancing round side by side. It was one of the Yankee’s jests. Next he wanted to waltz with both ladies at once, and he had already taken the two of them by the waist, one with his left arm, the other with his right, when M. de Saffré said, in his severe voice as cotillon-king:

“You can’t dance with two ladies.”

But Mr. Simpson refused to leave go of the two waists. Adeline and Suzanne threw themselves back in his arms, laughing. The point was argued, the ladies grew angry, the uproar was prolonged, and the dress-coats in the recesses of the windows asked themselves how Saffré proposed to extricate himself creditably from this dilemma. For a moment, in fact, he seemed perplexed, seeking by what refinement of grace he could win the laughers to his side. Then he gave a smile, he took Madame d’Espanet and Madame Haffner, each by one hand, whispered a question in their ears, received their reply, and next addressing himself to Mr. Simpson:

“Do you pick verbena or periwinkle?”

Mr. Simpson, looking rather foolish, said that he picked verbena. Whereupon M. de Saffré handed him the marquise, saying:

“Here’s your verbena.”

There was discreet applause. They thought this very neat. M. de Saffré was a cotillon-leader “who was never at a loss,” so the ladies said. In the meanwhile the band had with its full strength resumed the waltz air, and Mr. Simpson, after waltzing round the room with Madame d’Espanet, led her back to her seat.

Renée was able to pass. She had bitten her lips till the blood came, at the sight of all “this nonsense.” She thought these men and women stupid to throw scarves about and call themselves by the names of plants. Her ears rang, a furious impatience gave her an abrupt desire to throw herself headlong forward and effect a passage. She crossed the drawingroom with a rapid step, jostling the belated couples returning to their seats. She went straight to the conservatory. She had seen neither Louise nor Maxime among the dancers, she said to herself that they must be there, in some nook of foliage, brought together by that instinct for fun and improprieties that made them seek out little corners as soon as they found themselves anywhere together. But she explored the dimness of the conservatory in vain. She only perceived, in the back of an arbour, a tall young man devoutly kissing little Madame Daste’s hands, murmuring:

“Madame de Lauwerens was right: you’re an angel!”

This declaration made in her house, in her conservatory, shocked her. Really Madame de Lauwerens ought to have taken her trade elsewhere! And Renée would have felt relieved could she have turned out of her rooms all these people who shouted so loudly. Standing before the tank, she looked at the water, she asked herself where Louise and Maxime could have hidden themselves. The orchestra still played the same waltz, whose slow undulation made her feel sick. It was unendurable, not to be able to reflect in one’s own house. She became confused. She forgot that the young people were not married yet, and she said to herself it was perfectly clear they had gone to bed. Then she thought of the dining-room, she quickly ran up the conservatory steps. But, at the door of the ballroom, she was for the second time stopped by a figure of the cotillon.

“This is the ‘Dark Spots,’ mesdames,” said M. de Saffré, gallantly. “It is my own invention, and you shall be the first to have the benefit of it.”

There was much laughter. The men explained the allusion to the ladies. The Emperor had just made a speech in which he had referred to the presence of “certain dark spots” on the horizon. These dark spots, for no appreciable reason, had had a great success. The Parisian wits had appropriated the expression so much so that for the past week the dark spots had been applied to everything. M. de Saffré placed the gentlemen at one end of the room, making them turn their backs on the ladies, who were left at the other end. Then he ordered them to pull up their coats so as to hide the backs of their heads. This performance was gone through amid the maddest merriment. Hunchbacked, their shoulders screwed up, their coat tails falling no lower than their waists, the cavaliers looked really hideous.

“Don’t laugh, mesdames,” cried M. de Saffré with most humorous seriousness, “or I shall make you put your skirts over your heads.”

The gaiety redoubled. And he energetically availed himself of his sovereignty in respect of some of the gentlemen who refused to conceal the back of their necks.

“You are ‘dark spots,’“ he said, “hide your heads, show nothing but your backs, the ladies must see nothing but black…. Now walk about, mix yourselves, so that you may not be recognized.”

Gaiety was at its highest. The “dark spots” went to and fro, on their thin legs, with the swaying of headless crows. One gentleman’s shirt showed, with a bit of brace. Then the ladies begged for mercy, they were dying with laughter, and M. de Saffré graciously ordered them to go and fetch the “dark spots.” They flew off, like a covey of partridges, with a loud rustle of skirts. Then at the end of her run each seized hold of the cavalier nearest at hand. It was an indescribable hurly-burly. And one after the other the improvised couples disengaged themselves, waltzed round the room to the louder strains of the band.

Renée leant against the wall. She looked on, pale, with pursed lips. An old gentleman came gallantly to ask her why she did not dance. She had to smile, to answer something. She made her escape, she entered the supper-room. The room was empty. Amid the pillaged sideboards, the bottles and plates left lying about, Maxime and Louise sat quietly supping at one end of the table, side by side, on a napkin they had spread out between them. They looked quite at home, they laughed amid this disorder, amid the dirty plates, the greasy dishes, the still tepid remnants of the gluttony of the white-gloved supper-eaters. They had contented themselves with brushing away the crumbs around them. Baptiste stalked solemnly round the table, without a glance for the room, which looked as though it had been traversed by a pack of wolves; he waited for the servants to come and restore a semblance of order to the sideboards.

Maxime had succeeded in getting a very comfortable supper together. Louise adored nougat aux pistaches, a plateful of which had remained intact on the top of a sideboard. They had three partially-emptied bottles of champagne before them. “Perhaps papa has gone,” said the girl.

“So much the better!” replied Maxime. “I will see you home.”

And as she laughed:

“You know, they have made up their minds that I am to marry you. It’s no longer a joke, it’s serious…. What are we going to do when we get married?”

“We’ll do what the others do, of course!”

This joke escaped her rather quickly; she hastily added, as though to withdraw it:

“We will go to Italy. That will be good for my chest, I am very ill…. Ah, my poor Maxime, what a funny wife you’ll have! I’m no fatter than two sous’ worth of butter.”

She smiled, with a touch of melancholy, in her page’s dress. A dry cough sent a hectic flush to her cheeks.

“It’s the nougat,” she said. “I’m not allowed to eat it at home…. Pass me the plate, I will put the rest in my pocket.”

And she was emptying out the plate, when Renée entered. She went straight to Maxime, making an unconscionable effort to keep herself from cursing, from striking that hunchback whom she found there sitting at table with her lover.

“I want to speak to you,” she stammered, in a husky voice.

He wavered, alarmed, fearing to be alone with her.

“Alone, and at once,” repeated Renée.

“Why don’t you go, Maxime?” said Louise, with her unfathomable look. “You might at the same time see if you can discover what’s become of my father. I lose him at every party we go to.”

He rose, he endeavoured to stop Renée in the middle of the supper-room, asking her what she could have of so urgent a nature to communicate to him. But she rejoined between her teeth:

“Follow me, or I’ll speak out before everybody!”

He turned very pale, he followed her with the docility of a beaten animal. She thought Baptiste looked at her; but at this moment what did she care for the valet’s steady gaze? At the door the cotillon detained her a third time.

“Wait,” she muttered. “These idiots will never finish.”

And she took his hand, lest he should try to get away.

M. de Saffré was placing the Duc de Rozan with his back to the wall, in a corner of the room beside the door of the dining-room. He put a lady in front of him, then a gentleman back to back with the lady, then another lady facing the gentleman, and so on in a line, couple by couple, like a long snake. As the ladies lingered and talked:

“Come along, mesdames!” he cried. “Take your places for the ‘Columns.’“

They came, “the columns” were formed. The indecency of finding themselves thus caught, squeezed in between two men, leaning against the back of one, and feeling the chest of the other in front, made these ladies very gay. The tips of the breasts touched the facings of the dress-coats, the legs of the gentlemen disappeared in the ladies’ skirts, and when any sudden outburst of merriment made a head lean forward, the moustachios in front were obliged to draw back so as not to carry matters so far as kissing. At one moment a wag must have given a slight push, for the line closed up, the men plunged deeper into the skirts; there were little cries, laughs, endless laughs. The Baronne de Meinhold was heard to say: “But, monsieur, you are smothering me; don’t squeeze me so hard!” and this seemed so amusing, and occasioned so mad a fit of hilarity in the whole row that “the columns” tottered, staggered, clashed together, leant one against the other to avoid falling. M. de Saffré waited with raised hands, ready to clap. Then he clapped. At this signal, suddenly, all turned round. The couples who found themselves face to face clasped waists, and the row dispersed its chaplet of dancers into the room. None remained but the poor Duc de Rozan, who, on turning round, found himself stuck with his nose against the wall. He was ridiculed.

“Come,” said Renée to Maxime.

The band still played the waltz. This soft music, whose monotonous rhythm tended to become insipid, redoubled Renée’s exasperation. She gained the small drawingroom, holding Maxime by the hand; and pushing him up the staircase that led to the dressing-room:

“Go up,” she ordered.

She followed him. At this moment Madame Sidonie, who had been prowling after her sister-in-law the whole evening, astonished at her continual wanderings through the rooms, just reached the conservatory steps. She saw a man’s legs plunging into the darkness of the little staircase. A pale smile lit up her waxen face, and catching up her sorceress’s dress so as to go quicker, she hunted for her brother, upsetting a figure of the cotillon, questioning the servants she met on her way. She at last found Saccard with M. de Mareuil in a room adjacent to the dining-room, that had been fitted up as a temporary smoking-room. The two fathers were discussing the settlements, the contract. But when his sister came up and whispered a word in his ear, Saccard rose, apologized, disappeared.

Upstairs, the dressing-room was in complete disorder. On the chairs trailed Echo’s costume, the torn tights, odds and ends of crumpled lace, underclothing thrown aside in a heap, all that a woman in the hurry of being waited for leaves behind her. The little ivory and silver utensils lay here, there, and everywhere; there were brushes and nail-files that had fallen on to the carpet; and the towels, still damp, the cakes of soap forgotten on the marble slab, the scent bottles left unstoppered lent a strong, pungent odour to the flesh-coloured tent. Renée, to remove the white from her arms and shoulders, had dipped herself in the pink marble bath, after the tableaux-vivants. Iridescent soap-stains floated on the surface of the water now grown cold.

Maxime stepped on a corset, almost stumbled, tried to laugh. But he shuddered before Renée’s stern face. She came up to him, pushed him, said in a low voice:

“So you are going to marry the hunchback?”

“Not a bit of it,” he murmured. “Who told you so?”

“Oh, don’t tell any lies, it’s no use….”

He had a moment of resistance. She alarmed him, he wanted to have done with her.

“Well then, yes, I am going to marry her. And what then?… Am I not my own master?”

She came up to him, with her head a little lowered, and with a wicked laugh, and seizing his wrists:

“The master! you the master!… You know better than that. It is I who am your master. I could break your arms if I were spiteful; you are no stronger than a girl.”

And as he struggled, she twisted his arms with all the nervous violence of her anger. He uttered a faint cry. Then she let go, resuming:

“See? we’d better not fight; I should only beat you.”

He remained pallid, with the shame of the pain he felt at his wrists. He watched her coming and going in the dressing-room. She pushed back the furniture, reflecting, fixing on the plan that had been revolving in her head since her husband had told her of the marriage.

“I shall lock you up here,” she said at last; “and as soon as it’s daylight we’ll start for Havre.”

He grew still paler with alarm and stupor.

“But this is madness!” he cried. “We can’t run away together. You are going off your head.”

“Very likely. In any case it is you and your father who have driven me so…. I want you, and I mean to have you. So much the worse for the fools!”

A red light gleamed from her eyes. She continued, approaching Maxime once more, scorching his face with her breath:

“What do you think would become of me if you married the hunchback? You would laugh at me between you, I should perhaps be obliged to take back that great noodle of a Mussy, who would leave my very feet indifferent…. When people have done what you and I have done, they stick to one another. Besides, it’s quite plain. I am bored when you’re not there, and as I’m going away, I shall take you with me…. You can tell Céleste what you want her to fetch from your place.”

The unfortunate Maxime held out his hands, beseeching her:

“Look here, Renée dear, don’t be silly. Be yourself…. Just think of the scandal.”

“What do I care for the scandal! If you refuse, I shall go down to the drawingroom and cry out that I have slept with you, and that you’re base enough now to want to marry the hunchback.”

He bent his head, listened to her, already yielding, accepting this will that thrust itself so rudely upon him.

“We will go to Havre,” she resumed in a lower voice, caressing her dream, “and from there we shall cross to England. Nobody shall ever interfere with us again. If that is not far enough away, we shall go to America. I who am always so cold shall be better there. I have often envied the Creoles….”

But in the measure that she enlarged upon her proposal, Maxime’s terror was renewed. To leave Paris, to go so far away with a woman who was undoubtedly mad, to leave behind him a tale whose scandalous side would exile him for ever! it was as though he were being stifled by a hideous nightmare. He sought desperately for a means of escape from this dressing-room, from this rose-coloured retreat where tolled the passing-bell of Charenton. He thought he had hit upon something.

“You see, I have no money,” he said, gently, so as not to exasperate her. “If you lock me in, I can’t procure any.”

“But I have,” she replied, triumphantly. “I have a hundred thousand francs. It all fits in capitally….”

She took from the looking-glass wardrobe the deed of transfer which her husband had left with her, in the vague hope that she might lose her senses. She laid it on the toilet-table, ordered Maxime to give her a pen and ink from the bedroom, and pushing back the soap-dishes, said, as she signed the deed:

“There, the folly’s done. If I am robbed, it is because I choose to be…. we will call at Larsonneau’s on the way to the station…. Now, my little Maxime, I am going to lock you in, and we will escape through the garden when I’ve turned all these people out of the house. We don’t even need to take any luggage.”

She resumed her gaiety. This mad freak delighted her. It was a piece of supreme eccentricity, a finish which, in her crisis of raging fever, seemed to her entirely original. It far surpassed her desire for the balloon voyage. She came and took Maxime in her arms, murmuring:

“My poor darling, did I hurt you just now? You see, you refused…. But you shall see how nice it will be. Would your hunchback ever love you as I love you? She’s not a woman, that little darkie….”

She laughed, she drew him to her, kissed him on the lips, when a sound made them both turn round. Saccard stood on the threshold.

A terrible silence ensued. Slowly, Renée took her arms from around Maxime’s neck; and she did not lower her brow, she continued staring at her husband with wide eyes, fixed like those of one dead; while the young man, dumbfoundered and terrified, staggered with bowed head, now that he was no longer sustained by her embrace. Stunned by this culminating blow which at last made the husband and the father cry out within him, Saccard stood where he was, livid, burning them from afar with the fire of his glances. In the moist, fragrant atmosphere of the room, the three candles flared very high, their flames erect, with the immobility of fiery tears. And alone to break the silence, the terrible silence, a breath of music floated up through the narrow staircase: the waltz, with its serpentine modulations, glided, coiled, died away on the snow-white carpet, among the split tights and the skirts fallen on the floor.

Then the husband stepped forward. A desire for brutality mottled his complexion, he clenched his fists to strike down the guilty pair. Anger in this small, turbulent man burst forth with the report of firearms. He gave a strangled chuckle, and always approaching:

“You were announcing your marriage to her, I suppose?”

Maxime retreated, leaned up against the wall.

“Listen,” he stammered, “it was she….”

He was about to accuse her like a coward, to cast the crime upon her shoulders, to say that she wanted to carry him off, to defend himself with the meekness and the trepidation of a child detected in fault. But his strength failed him, the words expired in his throat. Renée kept her statuesque rigidity, her mute air of defiance. Then Saccard, no doubt to find a weapon, threw a rapid glance around him. And on the corner of the toilet-table, among the combs and nail-brushes, he caught sight of the deed of transfer, whose stamped paper lay yellow on the marble. He looked at the deed, looked at the guilty pair. Then, leaning forward, he saw that the deed was signed. His eyes went from the open inkstand to the pen still wet, lying at the foot of the candlestick. He remained standing before this signature, reflecting.

The silence seemed to increase, the flames of the candles grew longer, the waltz passed along the hangings with a softer lullaby. Saccard gave an imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. He looked again at his wife and son with a penetrating air, as though to wring from their faces an explanation that he was unable to supply. Then he slowly folded up the deed, placed it in the pocket of his dress-coat. His cheeks had become quite pale.

“You did well to sign it, my dear,” he said, quietly, to his wife….”It’s a hundred thousand francs in your pocket. I will give you the money this evening.”

He almost smiled, and his hands alone still trembled. He took one or two steps, and added:

“It is stifling here. What an idea to come and hatch one of your jokes in this vapour-bath…!”

And addressing Maxime, who had raised his head, surprised at his father’s mollified voice:

“Here, come downstairs, you!” he resumed. “I saw you come up, I came to fetch you to say goodnight to M. de Mareuil and his daughter.”

The two men went downstairs, talking together. Renée remained behind alone, standing in the middle of the dressing-room, staring at the gaping well of the little staircase, down which she had just seen the shoulders of the father and the son disappear. She could not take away her eyes from this well. What! they had gone off quietly, amicably! These two men had not smashed one another! She lent an ear, she listened whether some hideous struggle were not causing the bodies to roll down the stairs. Nothing. In the tepid darkness, nothing but a sound of dancing, a long lullaby. She thought she could hear in the distance the marquise’s laugh, M. de Saffré’s clear voice. Then the drama was ended. Her crime, the kisses on the great gray-and-pink bed, the wild nights in the hothouse, all the accursed love that had consumed her for months came to this mean, vulgar ending. Her husband knew all, and did not even strike her. And the silence surrounding her, the silence through which trailed the never-ending waltz, frightened her more than the sound of a murder. She felt afraid of this peacefulness, afraid of this delicate, discreet dressing-room, filled with the fragrance of love.

She saw herself in the tall glass of the wardrobe. She came nearer, surprised at her own sight, forgetting her husband, forgetting Maxime, quite taken up with the strange woman she beheld before her. Madness rose to her brain. Her yellow hair, caught up at the temples and on the neck, seemed to her a nudity, an obscenity. The wrinkle in her forehead deepened to such a degree that it placed a dark bar above her eyes, the thin blue scar of a lash from a whip. Who had marked her like that? Her husband had not raised his hand, surely. And her lips astonished her by their pallor, her shortsighted eyes seemed extinct. How old she looked! She inclined her forehead, and when she saw herself in her tights, in her light gauze blouse, she gazed at herself with lowered eyelashes and sudden blushes. Who had stripped her naked? What was she doing there, bare-breasted, like a prostitute who uncovers herself to her stomach? She no longer knew. She looked at her thighs, rounded out by the tights; at her hips, whose supple lines she followed under the gauze; at her bust broadly discovered; and she was ashamed of herself, and contempt of her flesh filled her with mute anger against those who had left her thus, with mere bangles of gold at her wrists and ankles to cover her skin.

Then endeavouring, with the fixed idea of a brain giving way, to remember what she was there for, quite naked, before that glass, she went back by a sudden bound to her childhood, and she again saw herself at the age of seven in the solemn gloom of the Hôtel Béraud. She recalled a day when Aunt Elisabeth had dressed them, Christine and her, in frocks of grey homespun with little red checks. It was at Christmas-time. How pleased they had been with these two dresses just alike! Their auntie spoiled them, and she went so far as to give them each a coral bracelet and necklace. The sleeves were long, the bodices came up to their chins, and the trinkets showed up on the stuff, and they thought it very pretty. Renée remembered too that her father was there, that he smiled in his sad way. That day she and her sister had walked up and down the children’s room like grown-up people, without playing, so as not to dirty themselves. Then, at the Ladies of the Visitation, her schoolfellows had laughed at her about “her clown’s dress,” which came down to her fingertips and up over her ears. She had begun to cry during lesson-time. At playtime, so that they should not make fun of her any longer, she had turned up the sleeves and tucked in the neckband of the bodice. And the necklace and bracelet seemed to her to look prettier on the skin of her neck and arm. Was that when she had first begun to strip herself naked?

Her life unrolled before her. She witnessed her long bewilderment, that racket of gold and flesh that had mounted within her, that had first come up to her knees, then to her belly, then to her lips; and now she felt its flood passing over her head, beating on her skull with quick blows. It was like a poisonous sap: it had wearied her limbs, grafted growths of shameful affection on her heart, made sickly and bestial caprices sprout in her brain. This sap had soaked into her feet on the rug of her calash, on other carpets too, on all the silk, on all the velvet upon which she had been walking since her marriage. The footsteps of others must have left behind those poisonous seeds which were now germinating in her blood and being carried along in her veins. She clearly remembered her childhood. When she was little, she had been merely inquisitive. Even later, after that rape which had hurled her into wickedness, she had not wished for all that shame. She would certainly have become better if she had stayed knitting by Aunt Elisabeth’s side. And she heard the even clicking of her aunt’s needles, while she stood looking fixedly in the glass to read the peaceful future that had eluded her. But she saw only her pink thighs, her pink hips, that strange, pink silk woman standing before her, whose skin of fine closely-woven silk seemed made for the loves of dolls and puppets. She had come to that, to be a big doll from whose broken chest there issues a mere squeak of sound. Then, at the thought of the enormities of her life, the blood of her father, that middle-class blood that had always tormented her at critical moments, cried out within her, rebelled. She who had always trembled at the thought of hell, she ought to have spent her life buried in the gloomy austereness of the Hotel Béraud. Who was it, then, that had stripped her naked?

And in the dim blue reflection of the glass she imagined she saw the figures of Saccard and Maxime rise up. Saccard, swarthy, grinning, iron-hued, with his cruel laugh, his skinny legs. The strength of that man’s will! For ten years she had seen him at the forge, amid the sparks of red-hot metal, with scorched flesh, breathless, always striking, lifting hammers twenty times too heavy for his arms, at the risk of crushing himself. She understood him now; he seemed to her to have increased in height by this superhuman effort, by this stupendous rascality, this fixed idea of an immense, immediate fortune. She remembered how he sprang over obstacles, rolling over in the mud, not taking the time to wipe himself, so that he might attain his aim in good time, not even stopping for enjoyment by the wayside, munching his gold pieces while he ran. Then Maxime’s fair-haired comely head appeared behind his father’s rough shoulder: he had his clear harlot smile, his vacant strumpet eyes, which were never lowered, his centre parting, which showed the white of his skull. He laughed at Saccard, he looked down upon him for taking so much trouble to make the money which he, Maxime, spent with such enchanting indolence. He was kept. His long, soft hands bore witness to his vices. His smooth body had the languid attitude of a satiated woman. In all his soft, feeble person, in which vice coursed gently like tepid water, there shone not even a gleam of the curiosity of sin. He was a passive agent. And Renee, as she looked at the two apparitions emerging from the light shade of the mirror, stepped back, saw that Saccard had thrown her like a stake, a speculation, and that Maxime had happened to be there to pick up that louis fallen from the gambler’s pocket. She had always been an asset in her husband’s pocketbook; he urged her on to the toilettes of a night, the lovers of a season; he wrought her in the flames of his forge, using her as a precious metal with which to gild the iron of his hands. And so, little by little, the father had driven her to such a pitch of madness and abandonment as to desire the kisses of the son. If Maxime was the impoverished blood of Saccard, she felt that she herself was the product, the maggot-eaten fruit of those two men, the pit of infamy which they had dug between them, and into which they now both rolled.

She knew now. These were they who had stripped her naked. Saccard had unhooked her bodice, and Maxime had let down her skirt. Then between them they had at last torn off her shift. At present she stood there without a rag, with bracelets of gold, like a slave. They had looked upon her not a moment ago, and they had not said to her: “You are naked.” The son had trembled like a coward, shuddered at the thought of carrying his crime to the end, refused to follow her in her passion. The father instead of killing her, had robbed her; this man chastised people by rifling their pockets: a signature had fallen like a ray of sunshine into the midst of the brutality of his anger, and by way of vengeance he had carried off the signature. Then she had seen their shoulders diving down into the darkness. No blood on the carpet, not a cry, not a moan. They were cowards. They had stripped her naked.

And she recalled how, on a solitary occasion, she had read the future, on that day when, in sight of the murmuring shadows of the Parc Monceau, the thought that her husband would soil her and one day drive her mad had come to her and alarmed her growing desires. Ah! how her poor head hurt her! How she realized now the folly of the illusion which had led her to believe that she lived in a blissful world of divine enjoyment and impunity! She had lived in the land of shame, and she was punished by the desolation of her whole body, by the annihilation of her personality, now in its last agonies. She wept that she had not listened to the loud voices of the trees.

Her nudity irritated her. She turned her head, she looked around her. The dressing-room retained its heavy odour of musk, its warm silence, into which the waltz movements never ceased to penetrate, like the last expiring ripples on a sheet of water. This faint laughter of distant voluptuousness passed over her with intolerable irony. She stopped her ears so as not to hear it. Then she beheld the luxury of the room. She lifted her eyes along the pink tent, up to the silver crown that showed a podgy Cupid preparing his dart; they rested on the furniture, on the marble slab of the dressing-table, heaped up with pots and implements that now meant nothing to her; she went up to the bath still full of stagnant water; with her foot she thrust back the things that trailed down from the white satin of the easy-chairs, Echo’s dress, petticoats, neglected towels. And from all these things voices of shame arose: Echo’s dress reminded her of the mummery she had acquiesced in for the eccentricity of offering herself to Maxime in public; the bath exhaled the scent of her body, the water in which she had soaked herself filled the room with a sick woman’s feverishness; the table with its soap-dishes and cosmetics, the furniture with its bed-life fullness spoke to her rudely of her flesh, of her amours, of all the filth that she longed to forget. She returned to the middle of the room, with crimson face, not knowing where to fly from this alcove perfume, this luxury which bared itself with a harlot’s shamelessness, this pink display. The room was naked as herself; the pink bath, the pink skin of the hangings, the pink marble of the two tables assumed an aspect of life, coiled themselves up, surrounded her with such an orgy of living lusts that she closed her eyes, lowering her forehead, crushed beneath the lace of the walls and ceiling which overwhelmed her.

But in the darkness she again saw the flesh-coloured stain of the dressing-room, and she perceived besides the gray tenderness of the bedroom, the soft gold of the small drawingroom, the hard green of the hothouse, all this accomplice luxury. It was there that her feet had been impregnated with the poisonous sap. She would never have slept with Maxime on a pallet, in a corner of a garret. It would have been too low. Silk had cast a coquettish lustre over her crime. And she dreamt of tearing down this lace, of spitting upon the silk, of kicking her great bed to pieces, of dragging her luxury into some gutter whence it would emerge wornout and sullied as herself.

When she reopened her eyes, she approached the mirror, looked at herself again, examined herself closely. It was all over with her. She saw herself dead. Every feature told her that the breaking-down of her brain was nearly accomplished. Maxime, that last perversion of her senses, had finished his work, had exhausted her flesh, unhinged her intellect. No joys remained for her to taste, no hope of reawakening.

At this thought a savage rage was once more kindled within her. And in a final access of desire, she dreamt of recapturing her prey, of swooning in Maxime’s arms and carrying him away with her. Louise could never marry him; Louise well knew that he did not belong to her, since she had seen them kissing each other on the lips. Then she threw a fur cloak over her shoulders, so as not to pass quite naked through the hall. She went downstairs.

In the small drawingroom she came face to face with Mme. Sidonie. The latter, in order to enjoy the drama, had again stationed herself on the conservatory steps. But she no longer knew what to think when Saccard reappeared with Maxime, and abruptly replied to her whispered questions that there was “nothing whatever.” Then she guessed the truth. Her yellow face turned pale, she thought this was really too much. And she went softly and glued her ear to the door of the staircase, hoping to hear Renée cry, upstairs. When the latter opened the door, it almost struck her sister-in-law in the face.

“You are spying on me!” said Renée, angrily.

But Mme. Sidonie replied with fine disdain:

“Do you think I care about your filth!”

And catching up her sorceress’s dress, retreating with a majestic look:

“It’s not my fault, my dear, if you meet with mishaps…. But I bear no malice, do you hear? And understand that you would have found and could still find a second mother in me. I shall be glad to see you at my place, whenever you please.”

Renée did not listen to her. She entered the large drawingroom, she passed through a very complicated figure of the cotillon, without even remarking the surprise which her fur cloak occasioned. In the middle of the room were groups of ladies and their partners mingling together, waving streamers, and M. de Saffré’s fluted voice called out:

“Come, mesdames, the ‘Mexican War.’… The ladies who play the bushes must spread out their skirts and remain on the ground…. Now the gentlemen must dance round their bushes…. Then when I clap my hands each of them must waltz with his bush.”

He clapped his hands. The brass sang out, the waltz once more sent the couples spinning round the room. The figure was not very successful. Two ladies had been left behind on the carpet, entangled in their dresses. Madame Daste declared that the only thing that amused her in the “Mexican War” was making a “cheese” with her dress, as at school.

Renée, on reaching the hall, found Louise and her father, whom Saccard and Maxime were seeing off. The Baron Gouraud had left. Madame Sidonie went away with the Mignon and Charrier couple, while M. Hupel de la Noue escorted Madame Michelin, followed discreetly by her husband. The préfet had spent the latter part of the evening in making love to the pretty brunette. He had just succeeded in persuading her to spend a month of the fine season in his departmental town, “where she would see some really curious antiquities.”

Louise, who was covertly munching the nougat which she had put in her pocket, was seized with a fit of coughing just as she was leaving the house.

“Cover yourself up,” said her father.

And Maxime hastened to tighten the strings of the hood of her opera-cloak. She raised her chin, she allowed herself to be muffled up. But when Madame Saccard appeared, M. de Mareuil turned back, said goodbye. They all stayed talking there for a moment. Renée, to explain her paleness, her trembling, said that she had felt cold, that she had gone up to her room to throw this fur over her shoulders. And she watched for the moment when she could whisper to Louise, who was looking at her with tranquil curiosity. When the gentlemen shook hands once more, she leant forward, murmured:

“Tell me you’re not going to marry him? It’s not possible. You know quite well…”

But the child interrupted her, rising on tiptoe, speaking in her ear:

“Oh! make yourself easy. I shall take him away…. It makes no difference, since we are going to Italy.”

And she smiled with her vague, vicious, sphinx-like smile. Renée was left stuttering. She did not understand, she fancied that the hunchback was laughing at her. Then when the Mareuils had gone, after several times repeating, “Till Sunday!” she looked at her husband, she looked at Maxime with her terrified eyes. And seeing their tranquil and self-satisfied attitudes, she hid her face in her hands, fled, sought refuge in the depths of the conservatory.

The pathways were deserted. The great clumps of foliage were asleep, and on the heavy surface of the tank two budding water-lilies slowly unfolded. Renée would gladly have sought relief in tears; but this moist heat, this pungent odour which she recognized caught her at the throat, strangled her despair. She looked down at the spot in the yellow sand at her feet, on the margin of the tank, where last winter she used to spread out the bearskin rug. And when she raised her eyes, she saw yet one more figure of the cotillon right away in the background, through the two open doors.

The noise was deafening, there was a confused medley in which at first she distinguished nothing but flying skirts and black legs prancing and turning. M. de Saffré’s voice cried, “Change your ladies! change your ladies!” And the couples passed by amid a fine yellow dust; each gentleman, after three or four turns in the waltz, threw his partner into the arms of his neighbour, who in his turn threw him his. The Baronne de Meinhold, in her costume as the Emerald, fell from the hands of the Comte de Chibray into the hands of Mr. Simpson; he caught her as best he could by the shoulder, while the tips of his gloves glided under her bodice. The Comtesse Vanska, flushed, jingling her coral pendants, went with a bound from the chest of M. de Saffré to the chest of the Duc de Rozan, whom she entwined in her arms and compelled to hop round for five turns, when she hung herself on the hips of Mr. Simpson, who had just flung the Emerald to the leader of the cotillon. And Madame Teissière, Madame Daste, Madame de Lauwerens shone like large, live jewels, with the blonde pallor of the Topaz, the gentle blue of the Turquoise, the ardent blue of the Sapphire, had moments of abandonment, curved under a waltzer’s outstretched wrist, then started off again, fell back or forwards into a fresh embrace, visited one after the other the arms of every man in the room. However, Madame d’Espanet, standing in front of the band, had succeeded in catching hold of Madame Haffner as she sped by, and now waltzed with her, refusing to let her go. Gold and Silver danced amorously together.

Renée then understood this whirl of skirts, this prancing of legs. Standing lower down, she could see the eagerness of the feet, the whirling of glazed shoes and white ankles. At intervals it seemed to her as though a gust of wind were about to carry off the dresses. Those bare shoulders, those bare arms, those bare heads that flew and reeled past, caught up, thrown off and caught up again at the end of that gallery, where the waltz of the band grew madder, where the red hangings swooned amid the final fever of the ball, seemed to her as the tumultuous symbol of her own life, of her self-exposures, of her surrenders. And at the thought that Maxime, to take the hunchback in his arms, had abandoned her there, in the very spot where they had loved one another, she underwent a pang so great that she thought of plucking a stalk of the tanghin-plant that grazed her cheek, and of chewing it dry. But she was afraid, and she remained before the shrub, shivering under the fur which her hands drew over her with a tight clutch, with a great gesture of terrified shame.