Complete Works of Emile Zola (245 page)

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 demi-god 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 drawing-room, 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 plat-form.

“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 arm-chair. 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 drawing-room, 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 arm-chair, 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 fairy-like 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 pell-mell, 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 drawing-room. 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 drawing-room, 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, clean-shaven 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 good-natured 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: