IV
Guy de Lissac occupied a small summer-house forming a residence situated at the end of a court on Rue D'Aumale. He had given carte-blanche for the arrangement of this bachelor's nest,—a nest in which sitting-hens without eggs succeeded each other rapidly,—to one of those upholsterers who installed, in regulation style, the knickknacks so much in vogue, and who sell at very high prices to Bourse operators and courtesans the spurious Clodions and imitation Boulles that they pick up by chance at auction sales.
Lissac, who had sufficient taste to discover artistic nuggets in the gutters of Paris, had found it very convenient to wake up one fine morning in a little mansion crowded with Japanese bric-à-brac, Chinese satin draperies, tapestries, Renaissance chests and terra-cotta figures writhing upon their sculptured bases. The upholsterer had taste, Lissac had money. The knickknacks were genuine. There was a coquettish attractiveness about the abode that made itself evident in every detail.
This bachelor's suite lacked, however, something personal, something living, some cherished object, the mark of some particular taste, some passion for a period, for a thing, or pictures or books. In this jumble of ill-matched curiosities, where ivory netzkés on tables surrounded Barye bronzes and Dresden figures, there lacked some evidence of an individual character that would give a dominant tone, an original key, to the collection. This worldly dwelling, with its white lacquered bed and Louis XV. canopy and its heads of birds carved in wood like the queen's bed at Trianon, vaguely resembled the apartments of a fashionable woman.
But Guy had hung around here and there a Samouraï sabre, Malay krises, Oriental daggers in purple velvet sheaths, and upon the green tapestry background of the antechamber a panoply on which keen-bladed swords with steel guards were mingled with Scotch claymores with silver hilts, thus giving a masculine character to this hôtel of a fashionable lounger, steeped with the odor of ylang-ylang like the little house of a pretty courtesan.
This Guy enjoyed in Paris a free and easy life, leaving to Vaudrey, his old college-comrade at Grenoble, the pursuit of the pleasures of political life, and, as Lissac said in that bantering tone which is peculiar to Parisian gossip, the relish of the "sweets of power"; for himself, what kept him in Paris was Paris itself, just that and nothing more:—its pleasures, its first nights, its surprises, its women, that flavor of scandal and perfume of refined immorality that seemed peculiar to his time and surroundings.
He had squandered two fortunes, one after the other, without feeling any regret; he had made a brush at journalism, tried finance, won at the Bourse, lost at the clubs, knew everybody and was known by all, had a smiling lip, was sound of tooth, loved the girls, was dreaded by the men, was of fine appearance, and was unquestionably noble, which permitted him to enjoy all the frolics of Bohemian life without sullying himself, having always discovered a forgotten uncle or met some considerate friend to pay his gambling debts and adjust his differences on the Bourse speculations at the very nick of time; just now he was well in the saddle and decidedly attractive, with a sound heart and a well-lined pocket, enjoying, not disliking life, which seemed to him a term of imprisonment to be passed merrily—a Parisian to the finger-tips and to the bottom of his soul, worse than a Parisian in fact, a Parisianized provincial inoculated with Parisine, just as certain sick persons are with morphine, judging men by their wit, actions by their results, women by the size of their gloves; as sceptical as the devil, wicked in speech and considerate in thought, still agile at forty, claiming even that this is man's best time—the period of fortune and gallantry—sliding along in life and taking things as he found them, wisely considering that a day's snow or rain lasts no longer than a day's sunshine, and that, after all, a wretched night is soon over.
On leaving Vaudrey the previous night, Lissac had passed part of the night at his club on Place Vendôme. He had played and won. He had gone to sleep over a fashionable novel, very faithfully written, but wearisome in the extreme, and he had awakened late and somewhat heavy-headed. There were fringes of snow upon the window-sills and upon the house facing his little mansion. The roofs were hidden under a large white sheet and half lost in the grayish-white background of the sky.
"Detestable weather! So much the better," thought Lissac, "I shall have no visitors."
"I will see no one," he said to his servant. "In such weather no one but borrowers will come."
He had just finished his déjeuner, plunging a Russian enamelled silver spoon into his egg, his tea smoking at his side in a burnished silver teapot with Japanese designs, when, notwithstanding his orders, the servant handed him a card written in pencil on a scrap of paper torn from a note-book.
"It is not a borrower, monsieur!"
Guy seized the paper disdainfully, thinking, in spite of the servant's opinion, that he would find the name of a beggar who had not even had his name printed on a piece of Bristol-board, and, adjusting his glass, he deciphered the fine writing on the paper; then after involuntarily exclaiming: Ah! bah! and well! well! greatly astonished, he said as he rose:
"Show her in!"
He had thrown on a chair his damask napkin of Muscovite pattern, and instinctively glanced at himself in the mirror, just as a coquette might do before a rendezvous, smoothing out his flannel vest and spreading out his cravat that only half-fastened the blue foulard collar of his dressing-gown.
At the moment that he was examining the folds made on his red leather slippers by his ample flannel trousers, a woman half-raised the satin portière, and, standing within a frame formed by the folds of yellow satin, looked at the young man, displaying her brilliant teeth as she smilingly said:
"Good-morning, Guy!"
Lissac went straight toward her with outstretched hands.
She allowed the large satin portière to fall behind her, and after having permitted her little suède gloved hands to be raised for a moment, she boldly abandoned them to Guy, laughing the while, as they looked at each other face to face. He betrayed some little astonishment, gazing at her as a person examines one whom one has not seen for a long time, and the young woman raised her head unabashed, displaying her features in full light, as if submitting to an inspection with confidence.
"You did not expect me, eh?"
"Doubtless it is a considerable time since you thought of me."
Guy was inclined to bow and, as his only reply, to kiss the tips of her fingers; but he reflected that, since they last met, the parting of his brown locks had been devilishly widened, and he remained standing, answering with the conceit of a handsome man:
"You are mistaken, I often think of you."
She had, with, a sweeping glance around the room, examined the furniture of the apartment, the framed pictures, the designs and the gilding, and, on sitting down near the fire with her little feet crossed, she expressed her opinion:
"Very stylishly ensconced! You always had good taste, I know, my dear Guy."
"I have less now than formerly, my dear Marianne," he said, giving to this airy remark the turn of a compliment.
Marianne shrugged her shoulders and smiled.
"Do you find me very much altered?" she asked abruptly.
"Yes, rejuvenated."
"I don't believe a word of it."
"Upon my honor. You look like a communicant."
"Good heavens! what kind?" said Marianne, laughing in a clear, ringing, but slightly convulsive tone.
He was still looking at her curiously, seated thus near the fireplace.
The bright and sparkling fire cast its reflections on the gold frames in waving and rosy tints that brightened the somewhat pale complexion of this young woman and imparted a warm tone to her small and brilliant gray eyes. She half turned her fair face toward him, her retroussé nose was tiny, spirituelle and mobile, her large sensuous mouth was provoking and seductive, and suggested by its upturned corners, encouragement or a challenge.
She had allowed her cloak, whose fur trimming was well-worn, to slip from her shoulders, exposing her form to the waist; she trembled slightly in her tight-fitting dress, and golden tints played on her bare neck, which was almost hidden under the waves of her copper-colored hair.
She had just taken off her suède gloves with a jerky movement and was abstractedly twisting them between her fingers.
In spite of the somewhat depressing effect of her worn garments, she displayed a natural elegance, a perfect form and graceful movements, and Guy, accustomed as he was to estimate at a glance the material condition of people, divined that this woman felt some embarrassment. She whom he had known four or five years previously so charming amid the din of a life of folly, and the coruscation of an ephemeral luxury, was now burned out like an exploded rocket.
Of all the women whom he had met, he had certainly loved her the most sincerely, with an absolute love, unreflecting, passionate and half-mad. She was not dissolute but merely turbulent, independent and impatient of restraint. Too poor to be married, too proud to be a courtesan, too rebellious to accept the humiliations of destiny.
She was an orphan, and had been brought up by her uncle, Simon Kayser, a serious painter, indifferent to all that did not concern his art,—its morality, its dignity, its superiority—who had, under cover of his own ignorance, allowed the ardent dreams of his niece and her wayward fits to develop freely like poisonous plants; near this man, in the vicious atmosphere of an old bachelor's disorderly household, Marianne had lived the bitter life of a young woman out of her element, poor, but with every instinct unswervingly leaning towards the enjoyments of luxury.
She had grown up amid the incongruous society of models and artists and, as it were, in the fumes of paradoxes and pipes. A little creature, she served as a plaything for this painter without talent, and he allowed her to romp, bound and leap on the divans like a kitten. Moreover, the child lighted his stove and filled his pipe.
The studio was littered with books. As chance offered, she read them all eagerly and examined with curiosity the pictures drawn by an Eisen or a Moreau, depicting passionate kisses exchanged under arbors, where behind curtains, short silk skirts appeared in a rumpled state. She had rapidly reached womanhood without Kayser's perceiving that she could comprehend and judge for herself.
This falsely inspired man, entirely devoted to mystical compositions, vaguely painted—philosophical and critical, as he said—this thinker, whose brush painted obscure subjects as it might have produced signs, did not dream that the girl growing up beside him was also in love with chimeras, and drawn toward the abyss, not however to learn the mysteries hidden by the clouds, but the mystery of life, the secret of the visions that haunted her, of the disquieting temptations that filled her with such feverish excitement.
If Uncle Kayser could for one moment have descended from the nebulous regions, and touched the earth, he would have found an impatient ardor in the depth of Marianne's glance, and something feverish and restless in her movements. But this huge, ruddy, rotund man, speaking above his rounded stomach, cared only for the morality of art, æsthetic dignity, and the necessity of raising the standard of art, of creating a mission for it, an end, an idea—art the educator, art the moralizer,—and allowed this feverish, wearied, impulsive creature, moulded by vice, who bore his name, to wander around his studio like a stray dog.
Isolated, forgotten, the young girl sometimes passed whole days bending over a book, her lips dry, her face pale, but with a burning light in her gray eyes, while her fingers were thrust through her hair, or she rested upon a window-sill, following afar off, some imaginary picture in the depths of the clouds.
The studio overlooked a silent, gloomy street in which no sound was heard save the slow footfalls of weary and exhausted pedestrians. It was stifling behind this window and Marianne's gloomy horizon was this frame of stones against which her wandering thoughts bruised themselves as a bird might break its wings.
Ah! to fly away, to escape from the solemn egotism and the theories of Simon Kayser, and to live the passionate life of those who are free, loved, rich and happy! Such was the dream upon which Marianne nourished herself.
She had perpetually before her eyes, as well as before her life, the gray wall of that high house opposite the painter's studio, pierced with its many eyes, and whether on summer's stifling evenings, the shutters closed—the whole street being deserted, the neighbors having gone into the country—or in winter, with its gray sky, the roofs covered with the snow that was stained all too soon, when the brilliant lights behind the curtains looked like red spots on the varnished paper, Marianne ever felt in her inmost being the bitter void of Parisian melancholy, the overwhelming sadness of black loneliness, of hollow dreams, gnawing like incurable sorrows.
She grew up thus, her mind and body poisoned by this dwelling which she never left except to drag her feet wearily through the galleries of the Louvre, leaning on the arm of her uncle, who invariably repeated before the same pictures, in the loud and bombastic tone of a comediante, the same opinions, and grew enthusiastic and excited according as the pictures of the masters agreed with his style, his system, his creed. One should hear him run the gamut of all his great phrases: My sys-tem! Marianne knew when the expression was coming. All these Flemish painters! Painters of snuff-boxes, without any ideal, without grasp! "And the Titian, look at this Titian! Where is thought expressed in this Titian? And mo-ral-i-ty? Titian! A vendor of pink flesh! Art should have a majesty, a dignity, a purity, an ideality very different."
Ah! these words in ty, solemn, bombastic, pedantic, with a false ring, they entered Marianne's ears like burning injections.
These visits to the museum impressed her with a gloom such as a ramble in a cemetery would create, she returned to the house with depressing headaches and muttering wrathful imprecations against destiny. She even preferred that studio with its worn-out divans and its worm-eaten tapestries that were slowly shredding away.
There, at least, she was all alone, face to face with herself, consumed by a cowardly fear—the fear of the future—this young girl who had read everything, learned everything, understood everything, knew everything, sullied by all the jokes of the Kayser studio, which, in spite of the exalted, sacrosanct, æsthetic discussions which took place therein, sometimes shockingly resembled a smoking-room—this physical virgin without any virginity of mind, could there take refuge in herself, and there in the solitude to which she was condemned, she questioned herself as to the end to which her present life would lead her.
Of dowry she had none. Her father had left her nothing. Kayser was poor and in debt. She had no occupation. To run about giving private lessons on the piano, seemed to Marianne to degrade her almost to the level of domestic service. Those who wished to pose for the Montyon prize might do so! She never would!
Ah! what sufferings! what would be the end of such a life? Marriage? But who desired her? One of those talentless painters, who ventilated at Kayser's house, not merely their contemptuous theories, but also their down-at-the-heel shoes? To fall from one Bohemian condition to another, from exigency to want, to be the wife of one of these greasy-haired dreamers? Her whole nature shuddered in revolt at this idea. Through the open window, the tepid breath of nature wafted toward her the odor of the rising sap in gentle, warm whiffs that filled her with a feverish astonishment. Stretched on the patched divan, her eyes closed and her lovely form kissed by the tepid breeze, she dreamed, dreamed, dreamed—
The awakening was folly, a rash act, an elopement.
In the house on Rue de Navarin there happened to be one fellow more daring than the rest, he was an artist who, in the jostling daily life, kindled his love at the strange flame that burned in the lustful virgin's eyes. A glance revealed all.
The meeting with a rake determined the life of this girl. She fell, not through ignorance or curiosity, but moved by anger and, as it were, out of bravado. Since she was without social position, motherless and isolated, having no family, without a prop and unloved, well, she threw off the yoke absolutely. She broke through her shackles at one bound. She rebelled!—
She eloped with this man.
He was a handsome fellow, who thirsted for pleasure, and took his prize boldly about, plunging Marianne into the ranks of vulgar mistresses, and had not the mad woman's superior intelligence, will, and even her disgust, ruled at once over this first lover and the equivocal surroundings into which he had thrust her, she would have become a mere courtesan.
Kayser had experienced only astonishment at the flight of his niece. How was it that he had never suspected the cause that disturbed her thoughts? "These diabolical women, nobody knows them, not even those who made them. A father even would not have detected anything. The more excuse therefore for an uncle!" So he resumed his musing on elevated art, quieting his displeasure—for his comrades jeered him—by the fumes of his pipe.
Moreover, all things considered, the painter added, Marianne had followed the natural law. Full liberty for everybody, was still one of Simon Kayser's pet theories. Marianne was of age and could dispose of her lot without the necessity of submitting to a strict endorsement of her conduct. When she had "sounded all the depths of the abyss,"—and Kayser pronounced these words while puffing his tobacco—she would return. Uncle Kayser would always keep a place for her at what he called his fireside.
"The fireside of your pipe," Marianne once remarked to him.
So Kayser consoled himself for this escapade by the sacredness of art, the only sacredness he recognized. On that indeed he yielded nothing. What mattered it to the world, if a girl went astray, even if that girl were his niece? Public morality was not hurt thereby. Ah! if he, Kayser, had exhibited to the world a lewd picture, it would have been "a horse of a different color"! The dignity, seriousness, purity of art, that was right enough!—But a woman! Pshaw! a woman!—Nor was he heard once to express any uneasiness as to what might become of Marianne.
In the course of her perilous career, which, however, was not that of a courtesan, but that of a freed woman avenging herself, Marianne had met Guy de Lissac and loved him as completely as her nature allowed her to love. Guy entertained her. With him she talked over everything, she gave herself up to him, and made plans for the future. Why should they ever separate? They adored each other. Guy was rich, or at any rate he lived sumptuously. Marianne was a lovely mistress, clever, in fact, ten women in one. Guy became madly attached to her and he felt himself drawn closer to her day by day. She often repeated with perfect sincerity that she had never loved any one before.
The first lover, then? She did not even know his name now!
There was no reason why they should not live together for ever, a life of mutual joy and happiness, led by the same fancies, stirred by the same desires. Why ever leave each other, even once? But it was just this that induced Guy to abandon this pretty girl. He was afraid. He saw no end to such a union as theirs. The little love-affair that enticed him assumed another name: The Chain. He sometimes debated with himself seriously about marrying this Marianne, whose adventures he knew, but who so intoxicated him that he forgot all the past.
Uncle Kayser, entirely engrossed in the "dignity of art," and occupied with the composition of an allegorical production entitled The Modern Family,—a page of pure, mystic, social, regenerative art,—had certainly forgotten his niece; nevertheless, Lissac at times felt somewhat tempted to restore her to him. He was grieved at the thought of abandoning Marianne to another. His dread of marriage triumphed over his jealousy. One fine day, Guy suddenly brought about a separation. Feeling ill, he took to his bed, when one morning Marianne came to him and said in passionate tones:
"Now I will never leave you again! You are in danger, and I am here to save you!"
Guy now felt himself lost. His rapid perception, whose operation was as sudden as a blow of the fist, warned him that if he allowed this woman to install herself in his house, he might say good-by to liberty, and probably also to his life. This Parisian had laid down as a principle, that a man should always be unfettered. He held in horror this shameful half-marriage that the language of slang had baptized, as with a stain: Collage. He therefore decided to play his life against his liberty, and during the temporary absence of this nurse established at his bedside, he packed his clothes in his trunk at random, shivering as he was with fever, threw himself into a hack, and, with chattering teeth and a morbid shudder creeping over his entire body, had himself driven to the railroad station and departed for Italy.
Marianne was heartbroken anew at this unexpected departure. A hope had vanished. She loved Guy very sincerely, and she vainly hoped that she would hold him. He fled from her! Whither had he gone? For a moment, she was tempted to rejoin him when she received his letters. She surmised, however, that Guy, desiring to avoid her, caused his brief notes to be sent by some friend from towns that he had left. To play there the absurd part of a woman chasing her lover would have been ridiculous. She remained, therefore, disgusted, heartbroken for a moment like a widow in despair, then she retraced her steps to the Rue de Navarin, and returned to the fold, where she found Uncle Kayser still quite unruffled, with the almost finished picture of The Modern Family.
"That is, I verily believe, the best I have done, the most moral," said Kayser to her. "In art, morality before everything, my girl! Come, sit down and tell me your little adventures."
It was five years—five whole years—since Lissac had seen Marianne. Their passion had subsided little by little into friendship,—expressed though by letters. Marianne wrote, Guy replied. All the bitter reproofs had been exchanged through the post, yet, in spite of this correspondence, neither had sought the opportunity nor felt the desire to meet. The fancy was dead! Nevertheless, they had loved each other well!
Suddenly, without overtures, on this bitingly cold morning, Marianne arrived, half shivering, in the new apartment, warmed her tiny feet at the fire and raised to him the rosy tip of her cold nose.
Guy was somewhat surprised.
He looked with a curiosity not unmixed with pain at that woman whom he had loved truly enough to suffer love's pangs,—the innocents say to die of it. He tried to find again in the depths of those gray eyes, sparkling and malicious, the old burning passion, extinguished without leaving even a fragment of its embers. To think that he had risked his life for that woman; that he should have sacrificed his name; that he should have torn himself from her with such harsh bravado; that he should have cut deep into his own being in order to leave her; that he had fled, leaving for Italy with a craving desire for solitude and forgetfulness! Eh! yes, Marianne had been his true love, the true love of this blasé Parisian sceptic and braggart, and he sought, while again looking at the lovely girl, to recover some of the sensations that had flown, to recall some of those reminiscences which more than once had agreeably affected him.
Marianne evidently understood what was passing in Guy's mind. She smiled strangely. Buried in the armchair, whose back supported her own, and half-bending her fair neck that reclined on the lace-covered head-rest, she looked at Lissac fixedly with an odd expression, the sidelong glance of a woman, that seems to be her keenest scrutiny.
Through her half-closed lashes he seemed to feel that a malicious glance embraced him. The mobile nostrils of her delicate nose dilated with a nervous trembling that intensified the mocking smile betrayed by her curling lips. Her hands were resting upon her plump arms, and with a trembling motion of the fingers beat a feverish little march as if she were playing a scale on a keyboard.
Guy sought to evoke from the well-set, gracefully reclining form, from the half-sly and half-concealed glance, from the palpitating nostrils, something that reminded him of his former ecstasies. Again he saw, shadowed by the chin, that part of her neck where he loved to bury his brow and to rest his lips, greedily, lingeringly, as when one sips a liqueur. A strange emotion seized him. All that had not yet been gratified of his shattered, but not wholly destroyed love, surged within him.
Were it fancy or reminiscence, beside this woman he still felt as of old, a feeling that oppressed his heart and caused him that delightful sensation of uneasiness to which he had been a stranger in connection with his many later easy love adventures. A light, penetrating and sweet odor floated around Marianne, reminding Lissac of the intoxicating perfume of vanished days, an irritating odor as of new-mown hay.
He said nothing, while she awaited his remarks with curiosity. Guy's mute interrogation possibly embarrassed her, for she suddenly shook her head and rose to her feet.
"May one smoke here?" she said, as she opened a Russia leather cigarette-case bearing her monogram.
"What next?" said Guy, lighting a sponge steeped in alcohol that stood in a silver holder and offering it to Marianne.
She quickly closed her fine teeth on the end of the paper cigarette that she had rolled between her fingers and lighted it at the flame. The gleam of the alcohol brightened her eyes and slightly flushed her pale cheeks, which Guy regarded with strange feelings.
"Your invention is an odd one!" she said, as she returned him the little sponge upon which a tongue of blue flame played.
He extinguished it, and abandoning himself to the disturbing charm of reminiscences, watched Marianne who was already half-enveloped in a light cloud of smoke.
"There is one thing you do not know," he said. "More than once—on my honor—at the corner of the street, at some chance meeting, my old Parisian heart has beaten wildly on seeing in some coquettish outline, or in some fair hair falling loosely over an otter-skin cloak, or in some fair, vanishing profile with a pearl set in the lobe of the ear, something that resembled you. Those fur toques with little feathers that everybody wears now, you wore before any one else, on your fair head. Whenever I see one, I follow it. On my word, though, not for her. The fair unknown trotted before me, making the sidewalks echo to the touch of the high heels of her little shoes, while I continued to follow her under the sweet illusion that she would lead me at the end of the journey to a spot where it seemed to me a little of paradise had been scattered. It is thus that phantoms of loved ones course through the streets of Paris in broad daylight, and I am not the only one, Marianne, who has felt the anguish and heart-fluttering that I have experienced. Often have I found my eyes moist after such an experience; but if it were winter, I attributed my tears simply to a cold. Tell me, Marianne, was it really the cold that moistened my eyes?"
Marianne laughed.
"Come, but you are idyllic, my dear Guy," said she, looking at Lissac.
"Melancholy, nothing more."
"Let us say elegiac. Those little fits have come upon you rather late in the day, have they not? A little valerian and quinine, made up into silver-coated pills, is a sovereign remedy."
"You are making fun of me."
"No," she said. "But it was so easy then, seeing that the recollection of me could inspire you with so many poetic ideas and cause you to trot along for such a distance behind plumed toques—it was so easy not to take the train for Milan and not to fly away from me as one skips from a creditor."
Guy could not refrain from smiling.
"Ah! it is because—I loved you too dearly!"
"I know that!" exclaimed Marianne with a tone, in contrast with her elegance, of an artist's model giving a pupil a retort. "A madrigal that has not answered, no; does it rain?"
"I have perhaps been stupid, how can it be helped?" said Lissac.
"Do not doubt it, my dear friend. It is always stupid to deprive one's self of the woman who adores one. Such rarities are not common."
"You remember, dear Marianne," said Guy, "the day when you boldly wrote upon the photographs to some one who loved you dearly: 'To him I love more than every one else in the world?'"
"Yes," said Marianne, blowing a cloud of smoke upward. "Such things as that are never forgotten when one writes them with the least sincerity."
"And you were sincere?"
"On the faith of an honest man," she answered laughingly.
"And yet I have been assured since that time, that you adored another before that one."
"It is possible," said Marianne with sudden bitterness; "but, in the life that I have led, I have been so often purchased that I have been more than once able to mistake for love the pleasure that I have derived."
In those words, uttered sharply, and in a hissing tone like the stroke of a whip-lash in the air, she had expressed so much suffering and hidden anger that Lissac was strangely affected.
Guy, the Parisian, experienced a sentiment altogether curious and unexpected, and this woman whose bare neck was resting on the back of the armchair, allowing the smoke that issued from her lips in puffs to enter her quivering nostrils, seemed to him a new creature, a stranger who had come there to tempt him. In her languishing and, as it were, abandoned pose, he followed the outline of her graceful body, blooming in its youth, the fulness of her bust, the lines of her skirt closely clinging to her exquisite hips, and the unlooked-for return of the lost mistress, the forgotten one, assumed in his eyes the relish of a caprice and an adventure. And then, that bitter remark, spoken in the course of their light Parisian gossip, whetted his curiosity still further and awoke, perhaps, all the latent force of a passion formerly suddenly severed.
He was seated on an ottoman beside Marianne, gazing into the young woman's clear eyes, his hand endeavoring to seize a white hand that nimbly eluded his grasp. The movement of his hands suggested the embrace that his feelings prompted.
Marianne suddenly looked him full in the face and curtly said, in a tone of raillery, that suggested a past that refused to reopen an account for the future:
"Oh! oh! but is that making love, my friend?"
Lissac smiled.
"Come," she said, "nonsense! That is a romance whose pages you have already often turned over."
"The romance of my life," whispered Lissac in Marianne's ear.
"The more reason that it should not be read again. It is true there are books one never reads but once. And for that reason, probably, one never forgets them."
She rose abruptly, threw the stump of her cigarette into the fire and looked with a bright, penetrating glance, into Lissac's surprised eyes.
"Ah! it is a long while, you see, since you spoke laughingly—we have both heartily laughed at it—of the 'caprices of Marianne.' Do you know what I am, my dear Guy? Yes, where is the mad creature who was formerly your mistress? Abandoned to dark, profound and incurable ennui, I yawn my life away, as some one said, I yawn it away even to the point of dislocating my jaw. The days seem dull to me, people stupid, books insipid, while fools seem idiots and witty people fools. It is to have the blues, if you will, or rather to have the grays, to hate colorless objects, to be weary of the commonplace, to thirst for the impossible. A thirst that cannot be allayed, let me add. The pure, fresh spring that should slake my thirst has not yet gushed."
She talked in a dry, bitter tone, with a smile that frequently gave way to slight outbreaks of convulsive laughter almost as if she were attacked with a fit of coughing. From time to time, she blew away a cloud of smoke that escaped from her lips, for she had resumed her cigarette, or with the tip of her nail struck her papelito, knocking the ashes on the carpet.
Moved and greatly puzzled, but no longer thinking of the temptation of a moment before, Guy looked at her and nodded his head gravely, like a physician who finds a patient's illness more serious than the latter is willing to acknowledge.
"You are very unhappy, Marianne!" he remarked.
"I? Nonsense! Weary, disgusted, bored, yes; but not unhappy. There is still something great in misery. That can be battled against. It is like thunder. But the rain, the eternal rain, incessantly falling, with its liquid mud, that—ah! that, ugh! that is crushing. And in my life it rains, it rains with terrible constancy."
As she uttered these words, she stretched her arms out with a movement that expressed boundless weariness and disclosed to Guy the dull dejection that followed a great deception and a hopeless fall.
"Life? My life? A mere millstone mechanically revolving. A perpetual round of joyless love-episodes and intoxication without thirst. Do you understand? The life of a courtesan endured by a true woman. My soul is mine, my spirit and my intellect, but these are chained to a body that I abandon to others—whom I have abandoned, thank God! for I am satiated at length and have now no lover, nor do I desire one. I desire to be my own mistress, in short, and not the mistress of any person. I have but one desire, hear—"
"What?" asked Guy, who was deeply moved by this outburst of anger and suffering, this cry of pain that declared itself involuntarily, his feelings vacillating between doubt and pity.
"My pleasure," Marianne replied, "is to shut myself up alone in a little room that I have rented at the end of an unfrequented lane near the Jardin des Plantes, whither I have had transported all the wreckage saved from my past life: books, knickknacks, portraits, and I know not what. My intention is that I shall remain there unknown to all, my name, whence I come, where I go, my thoughts, my hatred, my past loves, everything, in fact, a secret. I shall cloister myself. I shall stretch myself out on a reclining-chair and think that if, by chance,—as happens sometimes—an aneurism, a congestion, or I don't know what, should strike me down in that solitude, no one would know who I am, nobody, nobody, and my body would be taken to the Morgue, or to the grave, it matters little to me, that body of which the little otter-trimmed toques recall to you the graceful, serpentine line. Ah! those plans are not very lively, are they? Well, my dear, such are my good moments. Judge of the others, then."
Lissac was profoundly stirred and very greatly puzzled. To call on him: that implied a need of him. But there was no attempt to find the marker at the place where the romance had been interrupted: therefore the visit was not to renew the relations that had been severed, yet not broken.
What, then, brought this creature, still charming and giddy, whose heart was gnawed and wrung with grief? And was she the woman—Guy knew her so well!—to return thus, only to conjure up the vanished recollections, to communicate the secret of her present sorrows and to permit Lissac to inhale the odor of a departed perfume, more airy than the blue smoke-wreaths that escaped from her cigarette?
After entrusting Guy with the secret of her yearning for solitude, she again indulged in her sickly smile, and still looking at Guy:
"You are, I am told, a constant guest at Sabine Marsy's receptions?" she said abruptly.
"Yes," replied Lissac. "But I have no great liking for political salons."
"It is a political centre, and yet not, seemingly. It is about to become a scientific one, if one may believe the reporters—Monsieur de Rosas is announced.—By the way, my dear Guy, you still see Monsieur de Rosas!"
While Marianne uttered this name with an indifferent tone, she slightly bent her head in order to scrutinize Guy.
He did not reply at once, seeking first to discover what object Marianne had in speaking to him about De Rosas. In a vague way he surmised that the great Castilian noble counted for something in Marianne's visit.
"I always see him when he is in Paris," he said after a moment's pause.
"Then you will see him very soon, for he will arrive to-morrow."
"Who told you that?"
"The newspapers. You don't read the newspapers, then?—He is returning from the East. Madame Marsy is bent on his narrating his travels, on the occasion of a special soirée. A lecture! Our Rosas must have altered immensely. He was wild enough of old."
"A shy fellow, which is quite different. But," asked Lissac after a moment, "what about Rosas?"
"Tell me, in the first place, that you know perfectly well that he will arrive to-morrow."
"I know it through the reporters, as you say. To-day, it is through the reporters that one learns news of one's friends."
"The important fact is that you know him, and it is because I am particularly anxious to hear Monsieur de Rosas that I come to ask you to present me at Madame Marsy's."
"Oh! that is it?" Guy began.
"Yes, that is it. I am weary. I am crazy over the Orient. You remember Félicien David's Desert that I used to play for you on the piano? I would like to hear this story of travel. It would make me forget Paris."
"You shall hear it, my dear Marianne. Madame Marsy asked me to introduce Vaudrey to her the other evening. You ask me to present you to Madame Marsy. I am both crimp and introducer; but I am delighted to introduce you to a salon that you will, I trust, find less gloomy than your little room of the Jardin des Plantes. In fact, I thought you were one of Sabine Marsy's friends. Did I dream so?"
"I have occasionally met her, and have found her very agreeable. She invited me to call on her, but I have not dared—my hunger for solitude—my den yonder—"
"Is the little room forbidden ground, is one absolutely prohibited from seeing it?" said Guy with a smile.
"It is not forbidden, but it is difficult. Moreover, I have nothing hidden from my friends," said Marianne, "on one condition, which is, that they are my friends—"
She emphasized the words: "Nothing but my friends."
"Friendship," said Guy, "is all very well, it is very good, very agreeable, but—"
"But—?"
"Love—"
"Do not mention that to me! That takes wings, b-r-r! Like swallows. It flits. It leaves for Italy. But friendship—"
She extended her small firm hand as rigid as steel.
"When you desire to visit me over there, I shall be at home. I will give you the address. But it is not Guy who will come, but Monsieur de Lissac, remember. Is that understood?"
"I should be very silly if I answered yes."
Marianne shrugged her shoulders.
"Compliments! How foolish you are! Keep that sort of talk for others. It is a long time since they were addressed to me."
She took that man's face between her hands and kissed his cheeks in a frank, friendly way. Guy became somewhat pale.
"I have loved you, and truly, that is enough. Do not complain or ask aught besides."
Ah! what an eager desire now prompted him to possess her again, to find in her his mistress once more, to restrain her from leaving until she had become his, as of old.
She had already thrown her cloak over her shoulders, and said, as she gently pushed open the door:
"So it is agreed? I am to go to Madame Marsy's?"
"To Madame Marsy's. I will have an invitation sent you."
"And I will call for you and take you. Yes, I, here, like a jolly companion. Or I'll go with my uncle. You will present me to Rosas. We shall see if he recognizes me."
She burst out laughing. "You will also introduce me—since that is your occupation—" and here her smile disclosed her pretty, almost mischievous-looking teeth—"to Monsieur Vaudrey, your comrade. A minister! Such people are always useful for something. Addio, caro!"
Guy de Lissac had hardly taken two steps toward Marianne before she had vanished behind the heavy folds of the Japanese portière that fell in its place behind her. He opened the door. Mademoiselle Kayser was already in the hall, with her hand on the handle of the door.
"At nine o'clock I shall be with you," she said to Lissac as she disappeared.
She waved a salutation, the valet de chambre hastened to open the door, and her outline, that for a moment stood out in the light of the staircase, vanished. Guy was almost angry, and returned to his room.
Now that she had left, he opened his window quickly. It seemed to him that a little blue smoke escaped from the room, the cloud emitted by Marianne's cigarette. And with this bluish vapor also disappeared the odor of new-mown hay, bearing with it the passing intoxication that for a moment threatened to ensnare this disabused man.
The cold outside air, the bright sunshine, entered in quivering rays. Without, the snow-covered roofs stood out clearly against a soft blue sky, limpid and springlike. Light wreaths of smoke floated upward in the bracing atmosphere.
Guy freely inhaled this buoyant atmosphere that chased away the blended odor of tobacco and that exhaled from the woman. It seemed to him that a sort of band had been torn from his brow which, but a moment ago, felt compressed. The fresh breeze bore away all trace of Marianne's kisses.
"Must I always be a child?" he thought. "It is not on my account that she came here, but on Rosas's. Our friends' friends are our lovers. Egad! on my word, I was almost taken in again, nevertheless! Compelled, in order to cut adrift again, to make another journey to Italy,—at my age."
Then, feeling chilly, he closed the window, laughing as he did so.
V
On the pavement of the Boulevard Malesherbes, two policemen, wrapped in their hooded coats, restrained the crowd that gathered in front of the huge double-door of the house occupied by Madame Marsy. A double row of curious idlers stood motionless, braving benumbed fingers while watching the carriages that rolled under the archway, which, after quickly depositing at the foot of the brilliantly lighted perron women enveloped in burnooses and men in white gloves, their faces half-hidden by fur collars, turned and crossed the row of approaching coupés.
For an hour past there had been a double file of carriages, and a continuous stream of guests arriving on foot, who threw their cigars at the foot of the perron, chatting as they ascended the steps, which were protected by a covering of glass. The curious pointed out the faces of well-known persons. It was said in the neighborhood that the greater part of the ministers had accepted invitations.
Madame Marsy's salons were brilliant under the blazing lights. Guests jostled each other in the lobbies. Overcoats and mantles were thrown in heaps or strung up in haste, the gloved hands reaching out as in the lobby of a theatre to receive the piece of numbered pasteboard.
"You have No. 113," said Monsieur de Lissac to Marianne, who had just entered, wearing a pale blue cloak, and leaning on his arm.
She smiled as she slipped the tiny card into her pocket.
"Oh! I am not superstitious!"
She beamed with satisfaction.
People in the hall stood aside in order to allow this pretty creature to pass by; her fair hair fell over her plump, though slender, white shoulders, and the folds of her satin skirt, falling over her magnificent hips, rustled as she walked.
Lissac, with his eyeglass fixed, and ceremoniously carrying his flattened opera-hat, advanced toward the salon, amid the greedy curiosity of the guests who contemplated the exquisite grace of the lovely girl as if they were inhaling its charm.
Madame Marsy stood at the entrance of the salon, looking attractive in a toilet of black silk which heightened her fair beauty, and, with extended hands, smilingly greeted all her guests, while the charming Madame Gerson, refined and tactful, aided her in receiving.
Sabine appeared perfectly charmed on perceiving Marianne. She had felt the influence formerly of this ready, keen and daring intelligence. She troubled herself but little about Marianne's past. Kayser's niece was received everywhere, and had not Kayser decided to accompany her? He followed in the rear of the young girl. People had not observed him. He chatted with a man about sixty years old, with a white beard and very gentle eyes who listened to him good-naturedly while thinking perhaps of something else.
"Ah! my old Ramel, how glad I am to see you!" he said with theatrical effusion.
"It is a fact that we rarely see each other. What has become of you, Kayser?"
"I? I work. I protest, you know, I have never compromised—Never—The dignity of art—"
Their voices were drowned by the hubbub of the first salon, already filled with guests; Sabine meanwhile took Marianne, whom Lissac surrendered, and led her toward a larger salon with red decorations, wherein the chairs were drawn up in lines before an empty space, forming, thanks to the voluminous folds of the curtains, a sort of stage on which, doubtless, some looked-for actor was about to appear.
Nearly all these chairs were already occupied. The lovely faces of the women were illuminated by the dazzling light. Everybody turned toward Marianne as she entered the room, under the guidance of Sabine, who led her quickly toward one of the unoccupied seats, close to the improvised stage on which, evidently, Monsieur de Rosas was going to speak.
Madame Gerson had taken her seat near Marianne, who searched her black, bright eyes with a penetrating glance in order to interrogate the thoughts of this friend of the family. Madame Gerson was delighted. Sabine, dear Sabine, had achieved a success, yes, a success! Monsieur Vaudrey was there! And Madame Vaudrey, too! And Monsieur Collard—of Nantes—the President of the Council! And Monsieur Pichereau, who, after all, had been a minister!
"That makes almost three ministers, one of whom is President of the Council! Sabine is overcome with joy, yes, absolutely crazy! Think of it: Madame Hertzfield, Sabine's rival, never had more than two ministers at a time in her salon."
She added, prattling in soft, linnet-like tones, that Madame Hertzfield's salon was losing its prestige. Only sub-prefects were created there. But Sabine's salon was the antechamber to the prefectures!
"And if you knew how charming Monsieur Vaudrey is—a delightful conversationalist—he has dined excellently—he was twice served with an entrée!"
Marianne listened, but her mind was wandering far away. She was debating with herself as to when Monsieur de Rosas would appear on that narrow strip of waxed floor before her.
Guy had correctly surmised: it was Rosas and Rosas only whom this woman was seeking in Sabine's salon. She wished to see him again, to talk to him, to tempt destiny. A fancy.—A final caprice. Why not?
Marianne thought that she played a leading part there. She remembered this José very well, having met him more than once in former days with Guy. A Parisian Castilian, more Parisian than Spanish, he spoke with exquisite finish the classic tongue, and with the free-and-easy manner of a frequenter of the boulevards, chatted in the slang of the pavement or of the greenroom; he was an eminent virtuoso and collector, an author when the desire seized him, but only in his own interest, liberal in his opinions, lavish in his disposition, attractive in his manners; an eager traveller, he had, at thirty years of age, seen all that was to be seen, he had visited India and Japan, drunk camel's milk under the tents of the Kirgheez, and eaten dates with the Kabyles, and narrated with a sort of appetizing irony, love adventures which might have seemed romantic brag, if it were not that he lessened their improbability by his raillery. He was a kind of belated Byron, who might have been cured of his romantic tastes by the wounds and contact of reality.
She especially recalled a visit in Guy's company to José at an apartment that the duke had furnished in Rue de Laval. He occupied a painter's large studio, draping it with Oriental tapestry, crowding it with knickknacks and panoplies of weapons: an extravagant luxury,—something like the embarrassment of riches in a plundered caravansary. It was there that José had regaled Marianne and Guy with coffee served in Turkish fashion, and while they chatted, they had smoked that pale Oriental tobacco, that the Spaniard, quoting some Persian poets, gallantly compared to the perfumed locks of Mademoiselle Kayser.
During her years of hardship, she had many a time recalled that auburn-haired, handsome fellow, with his blue eye, pensive and searching, and lower lip curled disdainfully over his tawny beard trimmed in Charles V. style, as he reclined there, stretched on Hindoo rugs, chanting some monotonous song as slow as the movement of a caravan.
"Isn't my friend Rosas a delightful fellow?" Guy had asked her.
"Delightful!"
"And clever! and learned! and entertaining! and, what is not amiss, a multi-millionaire!"
Marianne thought of the absolute power, satisfied desires, whims and possible dreams that were linked with that man. He was a mass of perambulating gold. How many times she had dreamed, in the mists of her recollection, of that somewhat haughty smile that curled his delicate mustache, and those keen-edged teeth gleaming though his reddish beard, as if greedy to bury themselves deep in flesh!
But where was the duke now? Among the Kabyles or the Mormons? At Tahiti, Greenland, or gone to the devil? The papers had once announced that he was organizing an expedition to the North Pole. Perhaps he was lost among the icebergs in the Arctic Seas! She smiled at that, sighing involuntarily with sincere emotion, but prompted by selfish regret.
It had seemed to her that José had more than once permitted himself to express his affection for her. Politely, correctly, of course, as a gallant man addresses a friend's mistress, but manifesting in his reserve a host of understood sentiments and tender restraint that suggested hidden or implied declarations. Marianne had pretended not to understand him. At that time, she loved Guy or thought that she loved him, which amounts to the same thing. She contented herself with smiling at the flirtation of Monsieur de Rosas.
"I have perhaps been very stupid," she said to herself. "Pshaw! he might have been as silly as I, if occasion demanded. The obligations of friendship! The phantom of Guy!"
She suddenly stopped and this name escaped her lips: José—Joseph!
Nevertheless, this was one of the vexations of this girl: she was angry because she had acted rightly. Others suffer remorse for their ill deeds, but she suffered for her virtue. She often thought of the Duc de Rosas, as her mother Eve must have thought of Paradise lost. She would have stirred, astonished, conquered, crushed Paris, if she had been the mistress of Rosas.
"What then! Whose fault was it? How foolish of one not to dare everything!"
Now see how suddenly and unexpectedly, just as an adversary might offer an opportunity for revenge, chance, at the turning-point of her life, had brought back to Paris this José whom she had never forgotten, and who perhaps remembered her, and by whom she would be recognized most assuredly, in any case. It was an unhoped, unlooked-for opportunity that restored Marianne's faith in herself, superstitious as she was, like all successful gamblers.
She had fallen, but how she could raise herself by the arms of the duke! One must be determined.
Guy and Sabine were met on the way, like two helpers. She profited by this circumstance, using the one to reach the other and to gain Rosas from the latter. She bore a grudge, nevertheless, against Guy de Lissac, the insolent and silly fellow who had formerly left her. Bah! before taking vengeance on him, it was most important to make use of him, and, after all, revenge is so wearisome and useless.
Now Kayser's niece, Guy's mistress, a woman who had given herself or who had been taken, who had sold herself or who had been purchased, a young girl who remained so in features, gracefulness and the virgin charms that clothed her courtesan's body—her smile a virgin's, her glance full of frolic—Marianne was now within a few feet of him whom she expected, wishing for him as a seducer desires a woman.
"If he has loved me one moment, one single moment, Rosas will love me," she thought.
The salon was stiflingly hot, but Marianne was determined to keep herself in the first row, to be directly under the eye of the duke.
She felt the waves of over-heated air rise to her temples, and at times she feared that she would faint, half-stifled as she was and unaccustomed now to attend soirées. She remained, however, looking anxiously toward the door, watching for the appearance of the traveller and wondering when the pale face of the Spaniard would show itself.
At a short distance from her there was a young woman of twenty-three or twenty-four, courted like a queen and somewhat confused by the many questions addressed to her; robed in a white gown, she was extremely pretty, fair, and wore natural roses in her ash-colored hair, her eyes had a wondering expression, her cheeks were flushed, and in her amiable, gracious manner, she disclosed a touch of provincialism, modesty and hesitation—Marianne heard Madame Gerson say to her neighbors:
"It is the minister's wife."
"Madame Vaudrey?"
"Yes! Very charming, isn't she?"
"Ravishingly pretty! Fresh-looking!"
Then in lowered tone:
"Too fresh!"
"Rather provincial!"
And one voice replied, in an ironical, apologetic tone:
"Bless me, my dear, nothing dashing! Hair and complexion peculiarly her own! So much the better."
Notwithstanding the low tone of this conversation, Marianne heard it all. One by one, every one looked at this young woman who borrowed her golden tints from the rising sun. She bore the popular name of the new minister. She entered into prominence with him, accepting gracefully and unaffectedly the weight of his fame. Her timid, almost restless, uncertain smile, seemed to crave from the other women pardon for her own success, and there, surrounded by a group of men seated near the window, were two persons for whom chairs had just been placed, one of whom was a young, happy man, who exhaled an atmosphere of joy, and looked from time to time toward Adrienne and Marianne as if to see if the young wife were annoyed.
"Where is Monsieur Vaudrey then?" Marianne asked Madame Gerson.
"Why, he is just opposite to you! There on your right, beside Monsieur Collard, and he is devouring you with his glances."
"Ah, bah!" said Marianne with an indifferent smile.
And she looked in her turn.
She had, in fact, already noticed this very elegant man who had been watching her for some time.
But how could she know that he was Monsieur Vaudrey? He was delightful, moreover, sprightly in manner and of keen intelligence. A few moments before, she had heard him, as she passed by him under Sabine's guidance, utter some flattering remarks which had charmed her and made her smile.
Ah! that was Vaudrey?
She had often heard him spoken of. She had read of his speeches. She had even frequently seen his photograph in the stationers' windows.
The determined air of this young man, whom she knew to be eloquent, had pleased her. She ought then to have recognized him. He was exactly as his photographs represented him.
Of all the glances bestowed on the minister, Marianne's especially attracted Sulpice. A moment previously he had felt a singular charm at the appearance of this woman, threading her way directly between the rows of men by whom she was so crowded as to be in danger of having her garments pulled from her body. In his love of definitions and analyses, Vaudrey had never pictured the Parisian woman otherwise, with her piquant and instantaneous seductiveness, as penetrating as a subtle essence.
Marianne, smiling restlessly, looked at him and allowed him to look at her.
Her cheeks, which were extremely pale, suddenly became flushed as if their color were heightened by some feverish attack, when, amid the stir caused by the curiosity of the guests, and a greeting manifested by the shuffling of feet and the murmuring of voices, Monsieur de Rosas appeared; his air was somewhat embarrassed, he offered his arm to Madame Marsy, who conducted him to the narrow stage as if to present him.
"At last! ah! it is he!"
"It is really the Duc de Rosas, is it not?"
"Yes, yes, it is he!"
"He is charming!"
The name of Rosas, although only repeated in an undertone by the lips of these women, rung in Marianne's ears, sounding like a quickstep played on a clarion. It seemed to her that a decisive moment in her life was announced fantastically in those utterances. Even now, while burning with the very fever of her eagerness, she felt the gambler's superstition. As soon as she saw José, she said to herself at once that if he saw her and recognized her first glance, then he had not forgotten her and she could hope for everything. Everything! "Men happily forget less quickly than women," she thought. "Through egotism, or from regret, some abandon themselves to their reminiscences with complacency, like this Guy, and recognize on our countenances the lines of their own youth. Others, perhaps, mourn over the lost opportunity, and the duke is sentimental enough to be of that class."
She thought that Rosas must look at her, yes, at any cost; and with body inclined, her chin resting on her gloved right hand, while the other handled her fan with the skill peculiar to the Spanish women, she darted at the duke a rapid glance, a glance burning with desire and in which she expressed her whole will. The human eye has within it all the power of attraction possessed by a magnetic needle. As if he had experienced the actual effect of that glance fixed on his countenance, the duke raised his head after a polite but somewhat curtly elegant bow, to look at the audience of lovely women whom Sabine had gathered to greet him, and, as if only Marianne had been present, he at once saw the motionless young woman silently contemplating him.
Rosas, as he appeared within the frame formed by the red curtains, his thin, regular and ruddy face looking pale against the white of his cravat and the bosom of his shirt, looked like a portrait of a Castilian of the time of Philip II., clothed in modern costume, his fashionable black clothes relieved only by a touch of vermilion, a red rosette. But however fashionable the cut of his clothes might be, on this man with the vague blue eyes, and looking contemplative and sad with his upturned moustache, the black coat assumed the appearance of a doublet of old, on which the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor looked like a diminutive cross of Calatrava upon a velvet cloak.
In fixing, to some extent, his wandering glance on the fervent look of Marianne, this melancholy Spanish face was instinctively lighted up with a fleeting smile that immediately passed and was followed by a slight, respectful bow, quite sufficient, however, to surround the young woman with an atmosphere that seemed to glow.
"He has recognized me! at once! come!—I am not forgotten."
As in the glorious moment of victory, her bloodless face was overspread with a dazzling expression of joy. Boldly raising her head and inviting his glances as she had braved them, she listened, with glowing eyes, drinking each word that flowed from his lips, her nostrils distended as if to scent the approach of an Oriental perfume, to the recital of the narrative commenced by the duke in a measured, cajoling tone, which grew animated and louder.
Everybody listened to Rosas. Only the slight fluttering of fans was heard like a beating of wings. Without changing the tone of his discourse, and recounting his travels to his audience as if he were addressing only Marianne, he told in a voice more Italian than Spanish, in musical, non-guttural cadences, of his experiences on the borders of the Nile, of the weariness of the caravans, of the nights passed under star-strewn skies, of the songs of the camel-driver, slowly intoned like prayers, of the gloom of solitary wastes and of the poetic associations of the ruins slumbering amid the red sands of the desert. At times he recited a translation of an Arabian song or remarked in passing, on some mournful ballad, refined as a Sennett, deep as the infinite, in which the eternal words of love, tender and affecting in all languages, assumed an intensely poetic character under the influence of their Semitic nature; songs in which passers-by, strangers, lovers dead for centuries, who had strewed, as it were, their joys and their sobs over the sands of the desert, told the color of the hair and of the eyes of their dear ones, pleaded with their betrothed dead for the alms of love, and promised to spectres of women rose-colored garments and flowers that time would never wither.
These songs of Arabs dying for Nazarenes, of sons of Mohammed sacrificing themselves for the daughters of Aïssa were so translated by this Castilian that the exquisite charm of the original, filtered through his rendering, lost none,—even in French,—of the special characteristics of his own nation, a half-daughter of the Orient. And inevitably, with its melancholy repetition, the poetry he spoke of dwelt on wounded, suffering love, on the anguish of timid hearts, and the sobs of unknown despairing Arabs, buried for ages under the sands of the desert.
The duke seemed to take pleasure in dwelling on these poetic quotations rather than on the reminiscences of his travels. His individuality, his own impressions vanished before this passionate legacy bequeathed by one human race to another. Marianne trembled, believing that she could see even in Rosas's thoughts a desire to speak especially for her and to her. Was it not thus that he spoke in his own house in the presence of Lissac, squatting on his divan like an Arab story-teller?
She felt her youth renewed by the memory of all those past years. She thought herself back once more in the studio on Rue de Laval. Sabine Marsy's salon disappeared, Rosas was whispering in her ear, looking at her, and allowing the love that he felt to be perceived, in spite of Guy.
Guy! who was Guy? Marianne troubled herself about no one but De Rosas. Only the duke existed now. Had Guy been blended with her life but for a single moment? She embraced Rosas with her burning glance.
She no longer saw Sulpice, but he never looked away from Mademoiselle Kayser. He thought her a most charming woman. A magnetic fluid, as it were, flowed from her to this man, and he, with wandering mind, did not hear one word of Monsieur de Rosas's narrative, but concentrated his thoughts upon that pretty, enticing woman, whom he could not refrain from comparing with his wife, sitting so near her at this moment.
Adrienne was very pretty, her beauty was more regular than the other's. Her smooth, blond hair was in contrast with the tumbled, auburn locks of Marianne, and yet, extraordinary as it was—Adrienne had never seemed to be so cold as on that evening, as she sat there motionless, watching, while a timid habitual smile played over her lips.
Sulpice suffered somewhat in consequence of this awkwardness on Adrienne's part, contrasted as it was with the clever freedom of manner, graceful attitude, and flowing outlines of that disturbing neighbor, with her dull white countenance, half-closed mouth, strange curl of her lips, which seemed turned up as if in challenge. She was decidedly a Parisian, with all her intoxicating charms, that alluring, if vicious attraction that flows from the eyes of even modest girls. Some words spoken by Monsieur de Rosas reaching Vaudrey's ears—a description of the somewhat fantastical preparation of poison by the Indians, explained by the duke by way of parenthesis—suggested to Sulpice that the most subtle, the gentlest and most certainly deadly poison was, after all, the filtering of a woman's glance through the very flesh of a man, and he thirsted for that longed-for poison, intoxicating and delicious—
He was anxious for the duke to finish his remarks. What interest had he in all those travels, those Arabic translations, that Oriental poetry, or that poison from America? He was seized with the desire to know what such a charming creature as Marianne thought. Ah! what a pretty girl! He had already inquired her name; he happened to know Uncle Kayser; the painter had formerly sent him a printed memoir On the Method of Moralizing Art through the Mind.
The minister experienced on hearing Rosas the feeling of enervation that attacked him in the Chamber when, near the dinner-hour, an orator became too long-winded in his speech. He was unable to resist remarking in a whisper to the President of the Council, who was near him:
"Suppose we call for the clôture?"
Monsieur Collard in a diplomatic way expressed his approval of Rosas by a look that at the same time rebuked his colleague Vaudrey for his lack of sufficient gravity.
The duke did not tire any one except Sulpice. He was listened to with delight. The sentimental exterior of this man concealed a jester's nature, and the sober appearance of this Castilian wore all the characteristics of a polished lounger. The least smile that animated his passive countenance became at once attractive. Marianne thought him most delightful, or rather, she found him just what she had formerly believed him to be, a refined, delicate and very simple man in spite of his graciously haughty manner. When he concluded, the room echoed with the thunder of the applause. Even in the adjoining rooms the people applauded, for silence had been secured so as to hear his remarks. With a wave of his gloved hand, Rosas seemed to disclaim that his discourse merited the applause, and he received the greetings as a man of the world receives a salutation, not as a tenor acknowledging the homage paid to him. He strove to make his way through the group of young men who were stationed behind him.
"At last!" said Vaudrey, in a half-whisper.
It was the moment for which he had been waiting. He would be able now to address himself to Mademoiselle Kayser!
He hastened to offer his arm to Marianne.
Madame Marsy, eagerly and quickly, had already appropriated Monsieur de Rosas, who was moreover surrounded and escorted by a crowd who congratulated him noisily. Except for that, Marianne would have gone direct to him in obedience to her desires.
Vaudrey's arm, however, was not to be despised. The new minister was the leading figure in the assembly. She looked at Sulpice full in the face as if to inquire the cause of his eagerness in placing himself at her side, and observing that this somewhat mocking interrogation disconcerted him, she smiled at him graciously.
She passed on smiling, amid the double row of guests who bowed as she passed. She suddenly felt a sort of bewilderment, it seemed to her that all these salutations were for her benefit. She believed herself created for adoration. Inwardly she felt well-disposed towards Sulpice now, because he had so gallantly chosen and distinguished her among all these women.
After all, she would easily find Rosas again. And who knows? It would perhaps be better that the duke should seek her. Meanwhile, she crossed the salons, leaning on the arm of the minister. It was a kind of triumph.
Good-naturedly and politely, but without pride, the minister received all these attentions, becoming as they were to him in his official capacity, and as he moved on he uttered from time to time some commonplace compliment to Marianne, reserving his more intimate remarks for the immediate future.