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
