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.
CHAPTER VII
Three months later, on one of those dismal spring mornings which in Paris recall the dimness and murky humidity of winter, Aristide Saccard got out of a cab in the Place du Château-d’Eau and turned with four other gentlemen into the space in the middle of the demolitions upon the site of what was to become the Boulevard du Prince-Eugène. They formed a committee of inspection which had been sent by the compensations commission to value certain houses on the spot, their owners not having been able to come to terms with the Ville.
Saccard was repeating the stroke of fortune of the Rue de la Pépinière. So that his wife’s name might remain quite out of it, he began by a spurious sale of the building-plots and the music-hall. Larsonneau handed over the lot to an imaginary creditor. The deed of sale bore the colossal figure of three million francs. This figure was so outrageous that the committee at the Hotel de Ville, when the expropriation-agent,
