“Are you comfortable? You’re not too warm?”
The baron gave a slight grunt.
“He is breaking up, he is breaking up day by day,” added M. Toutin-Laroche, in an undertone, turning towards the other gentlemen.
M. Michelin smiled, threw down his eyelids from time to time, gently, so as to look at his red ribbon. The Mignon and Charrier couple, planted squarely upon their big feet, seemed much more at their ease in their dress-clothes since they had taken to wearing diamonds. However, it was nearly midnight, and the company was growing impatient; it was not so illbred as to murmur, but the fans fluttered more nervously, and the sound of conversations increased.
At last M. Hupel de la Noue reappeared. He had passed one shoulder through the narrow opening when he perceived Madame d’Espanet at length ascending the platform; the other ladies, already posed for the first picture, were only waiting for her. The préfet turned round, showing his back to the audience, and he could be seen talking to the marquise, who was concealed by the curtains. He lowered his voice, and with compliments blown from his fingertips, said:
“My congratulations, marquise. Your costume is delicious.”
“I have a much prettier one underneath!” replied she, bluntly, laughing in his face, so funny did he seem to her, buried as he was in draperies.
“Ah, charming, charming!” he murmured, with an air of rapture.
He dropped the corner of the curtain, he went and joined the group of serious men, desiring to enjoy his work. He was no longer the man running with haggard face in search of Echo’s girdle of leaves. He beamed, and panted, and wiped his forehead. He still had the mark of the little white hand on the sleeve of his coat; and moreover the thumb of his right-hand glove was stained with red at the tip; he had no doubt dipped his thumb into one of those ladies’ make-up boxes. He smiled, he fanned himself, he stammered out:
“She is adorable, enchanting, astounding!”
“Who is?” asked Saccard.
“The marquise. What do you think she said to me just now…?”
And he told the story. It was considered quite perfect. The gentlemen repeated it to one another. Even the dignified M. Haffner, who had drawn nearer, could not prevent himself from applauding. Meanwhile, a piano, which few of the people had noticed, began to play a waltz. Then there came a great silence. The waltz had endless, capricious variations; and a very soft phrase ever mounted from the keyboard, finishing in a nightingale’s trill; then deeper notes took up the theme, more slowly. It was very voluptuous. The ladies, their heads a little to one side, smiled. On the other hand the piano had put a sudden stop to M. Hupel de la Noue’s merriment. He looked anxiously towards the red velvet curtains, he said to himself that he ought to have posed Madame d’Espanet himself, as he had posed the others.
The curtains opened slowly, the piano resumed the waltz, with the soft pedal down. A murmur sped through the drawingroom. The ladies leant forward, the men stretched out their necks, whilst admiration displayed itself here and there by a word too loudly spoken, an unconscious sigh, a stifled laugh. This lasted for fully five minutes, under the glare of the three chandeliers.
M. Hupel de la Noue, relieved, beamed beatifically upon his poem. He could not resist the temptation to repeat to the people around him what he had been saying for a month past:
“I did think of doing it in verse…. But, don’t you agree with me, it’s more dignified like this….”
Then, while the waltz rose and fell in an endless lullaby, he explained. The Mignon and Charrier couple had drawn nearer and were listening attentively.
“You know the subject, don’t you? The beauteous Narcissus, son of the River Cephisus and of the Nymph Liriope, scorns the love of the Nymph Echo…. Echo was an attendant of Juno, whom she amused with her speeches while Jupiter was roving about the world…. Echo, daughter of the Air and the Earth, as you know….”
And he went into transports over the poetry of mythology. Then, more confidentially:
“I thought I might give rein to my imagination…. The Nymph Echo leads the beauteous Narcisse to Venus in a grotto on the seashore, so that the goddess may inflame him with her fire. But the goddess is powerless. The young man indicates by his attitude that he is not touched.”
The explanation was not out of place, for few of the spectators in the drawingroom understood the exact meaning of the groups. When the préfet had named the characters in an undertone the admiration increased. The Mignon and Charrier couple continued to stare with wide-open eyes. They had not understood.
On the platform, between the red velvet curtains, yawned a grotto. The scenery was made of silk stretched in large broken plaits, imitating the anfractuosity of rocks, upon which were painted shells, fishes and large sea-plants. The stage, broken up, rose in the shape of a hillock, and was covered with the same silk, upon which the scene-painter had depicted a fine sand ground, constellated with pearls and silver spangles. It was a retreat fit for a goddess. There on the top of the hillock, stood Mme. de Lauwerens as Venus; rather stout, wearing her pink tights with the dignity of an Olympian duchess, she interpreted her part of the Queen of Love with large, severe, devouring eyes. Behind her, showing only her mischievous head, her wings and her quiver, little Mme. Daste lent her smile to the amiable character of Cupid. Then on one side of the hillock, the three Graces, Mmes. de Guende, Teissière and de Meinhold, all in muslin, stood smiling and intertwined as in Pradier’s group; while on the other side, the Marquise d’Espanet and Mme. Haffner, enveloped in the same flow of lace, their arms round each other’s waists, their hair intermingled, gave a risky note to the picture, a reminiscence of Lesbos, which M. Hupel de la Noue explained in a lower voice, for the benefit of the men only, saying that he intended by this to show the extent of Venus’s power. At the foot of the hillock, the Countess Vanska impersonated Voluptuousness; she lay outstretched, twisted by a final spasm, her eyes half closed and languishing, as though satiated; very dark, she had unloosened her black hair, and her bodice, streaked with tawny flames, showed portions of her glowing skin. The scale of colour of the costumes, from the snowy white of Venus’s veil to the dark-red of Voluptuousness’ bodice, was soft, generally pink, flesh-coloured. And under the electric ray, ingeniously cast upon the stage from one of the garden windows, the gauze, the lace, all those light, diaphanous materials mingled so well with the shoulders and tights that those pink whitenesses seemed alive, and one was no longer certain that the ladies had not carried the plastic truth so far as to strip themselves quite naked.
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 demigod 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.