Complete Works of Emile Zola (246 page)

“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 arm-chair 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 drawing-room? 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 drawing-room 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 good-nature 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 drawing-room 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 to-morrow morning. Come to breakfast.”

The ball was about to begin. The servants had ranged the ladies’ chairs along the walls. The large drawing-room now displayed, from the small yellow drawing-room 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 drawing-room, 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 arm-pits 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 ball-rooms 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 drawing-room 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 drawing-room 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!
”