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
